Use Microsoft Excel data types to save unnecessary typing

If you’ve ever doing an assignment for work or study that requires you to display information about a country, you could manually search for it and type it out in Microsoft Excel, but that would be very laborious. Instead, you could use Excel’s data types to call in the information you want in a flash. Here’s how to do that.

What to do:

Assume you have to fill out information about three countries, Italy, France, and England, in an Excel spreadsheet. To find statistics like the population, the birthrate, and other statistics you could manually search for that information on the web and then fill it into the spreadsheet.

But the fast way is to click on the cell with the country name and select Data from the top menu in Excel. Then choose the geography data type. This will put a small marker next to the country name in the cell and a drop-down menu will appear next to it. If you click on that drop-down menu, you will be presented with the option to select information relating to that country. You can then go ahead and choose the information that you’d like to include (see the image below).

Dominic Bayley / Foundry

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Author: Dominic Bayley, Australian Editor, PCWorld