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The Data Tab

The Data tab, covered in Chapter 4, is your gateway to accessing data from external sources, such as data-

bases, other Excel workbooks, text files, and online sources such as Salesforce and Facebook. It also allows you

to validate data, remove duplicates, consolidate worksheets, and do subtotaling and outlining. It has the fol-

lowing groups:

● Get & Transform Data

● Queries & Connections

● Data Types (Office 365 subscription only)

● Sort & Filter

● Data Tools

● Forecast

● Outline

The Review Tab

When you’re ready to publish a workbook, you use the Review tab (discussed in Chapter 4). The Review tab

has all the editing tools you need to make sure your work is free of grammatical and spelling errors. You can

use it to add comments as visual aids for those receiving your workbook. In addition, the Review tab allows

you to protect worksheets and workbooks to safeguard both your information and any formulas you don’t

want people to change. The Review tab has the following groups:

● Proofing

● Accessibility

● Insights

● Language

● Comments

● Notes

● Protect

● Ink

The View Tab

The View tab, discussed in detail in Chapter 4, gives you the flexibility to set all your viewing options, such

as how the worksheet will be printed, whether to display gridlines or headings, and whether to view multiple

worksheets or view workbooks side-by-side. The View tab consists of the following groups:

● Workbook Views

● Show

● Zoom

● Window

● Macros

The Developer Tab

When you first open Excel, the Developer tab is disabled because the majority of Excel users never need

it. To enable the Developer tab, you can go to File > Options. Then, in the Excel Options dialog, select the

Customize Ribbon tab and check the Developer checkbox in the Main Tabs section on the right. This book

doesn’t delve into programming, but the Developer tab is worth introducing so that you’re aware of it.

Within each Office application resides a powerful application-specific programming language called Visual

Basic for Applications (VBA). VBA, which is a subset of the Visual Basic program language that many profes-

sional programmers use to write applications, allows you to harness the power of programming code to

automate tasks in Excel. Any repetitive task you perform in Excel (and other Office applications) can be auto-

mated so that the program does the work for you. A common example is automatically customizing a report

for different people and then sending those various versions of the report through Outlook with the click of a

button. To ensure that you don’t have to be a computer programmer to work with VBA, Microsoft has includ-

ed a tool called the Macro Recorder on the Developer tab. All you need to do is record a macro in Excel, and

when you play it back, the actions recorded in the macro are repeated exactly as you performed them.

The Developer tab consists of the following groups