How to Use Quick Analysis in Excel with AI

Your spreadsheet is filled with data, but turning that raw information into a clear story of what's working takes time. Instead of manually creating charts and calculating totals, you can use Excel’s built-in tools to speed up the entire process. This guide will walk you through exactly how to use the versatile Quick Analysis tool and how Excel’s newer AI features can help you uncover even deeper insights without complex formulas.

What is the Quick Analysis Tool in Excel?

The Quick Analysis tool is a feature that provides one-click access to some of Excel's most useful data analysis functions. When you select a range of cells, a small icon appears that opens a gallery of options, suggesting things like conditional formatting, charts, and calculations relevant to your specific data.

Think of it as a smart shortcut. Instead of navigating through multiple ribbon tabs to find the right tool, Quick Analysis brings the most common options directly to your cursor, saving you clicks and time. It’s perfect for getting a fast visual or summary of your data without getting bogged down in menus.

How to Access Quick Analysis

Getting to the Quick Analysis menu is incredibly easy. All you need is a range of data.

1. Select Your Data: Click and drag your mouse to highlight the cells you want to analyze.

2. Find the Icon: A small icon will appear at the bottom-right corner of your selected range. This is the Quick Analysis tool icon.

3. Click the Icon (or use the shortcut): Clicking the icon opens the menu. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Q after selecting your data.

A Guided Tour of Quick Analysis Features

Once you open the Quick Analysis menu, you'll see a collection of tabs, each offering a different way to interpret your data. Let’s explore what each one does with a simple sales dataset.

Example Dataset: Monthly Product Sales

This dataset tracks sales figures for different products across several months. We'll use it to showcase each Quick Analysis feature.

1. Formatting

The first tab, Formatting, is all about adding visual cues to your data. This applies conditional formatting rules that make it easy to spot trends, outliers, and key data points at a glance.

• Data Bars: Adds a colored bar to each cell. The length of the bar corresponds to the cell's value, creating a simple in-cell bar chart. This is great for quickly comparing values in a column.

• Color Scale: Applies a color gradient to your cells. For example, it might color high values green, mid-range values yellow, and low values red, making it easy to spot performance at a glance.

• Icon Set: Adds icons like arrows, checkmarks, or circles to signal whether a value is high, average, or low relative to the others.

• Greater Than: Highlights cells with values above a certain threshold that you define.

• Top 10%: Automatically highlights the top 10% of values in your selected range.

By selecting our sales data and applying Data Bars, we immediately see a visual representation of each month’s performance without creating a separate chart.

2. Charts

The Charts tab is one of the most powerful features. Instead of you guessing the best way to visualize your data, Excel intelligently recommends chart types based on the structure of your selection.

For our sales data, selecting the 'Product' column along with the month columns and opening the Charts tab might suggest:

• Clustered Column/Bar Chart: Perfect for comparing sales figures for each product across the different months.

• Stacked Area Chart: Useful for showing how each product contributes to the total sales over time.

• Line Chart: Ideal for visualizing the sales trend for each product month over month.

With a single click, you can generate a professional-looking chart that would normally take several steps to create manually.

3. Totals

Need to run a quick calculation? The Totals tab saves you from writing formulas yourself. Depending on whether you want to calculate values for columns or rows, it offers different options.

When you have a column of numbers selected, you can add calculations to the bottom:

• Sum: Adds the total of the selected cells.

• Average: Calculates the average value.

• Count: Counts the number of entries.

• % Total: Calculates the percentage contribution of each cell to the total sum.

• Running Total: Adds a new column showing the cumulative total.

If you perform this action on rows of data, the blue-highlighted options will appear on the right side of your data instead of the bottom. For our sample data, clicking 'Sum' automatically adds a "Total" row, calculating the total sales for each month instantly.

4. Tables

The Tables tab helps you organize your data with two main features:

• Table: This formats your data range as an official Excel Table. Tables offer powerful benefits like easier sorting, filtering, and formula writing. When your data is in a Table, any charts or PivotTables based on it can be automatically updated when you add new rows.

• PivotTable: These are powerful tools for summarizing and reshuffling data. The Quick Analysis tool intelligently suggests a few pre-configured PivotTables that might be insightful for your selected data, such as "Sum of Sales by Product."

Turning our simple range into a table makes it much easier to manage. Clicking the 'PivotTable' option gives us an instant summary without having to build one from scratch.

5. Sparklines

Sparklines are tiny, single-cell charts that live inside a cell and provide a visual trend for a row of data. They're perfect for dashboards or summary tables where you need to show many trends compactly.

For our dataset, we could add a new column called 'Trend' and then use Quick Analysis to insert a sparkline for each product row. This would show the sales trajectory (increasing, decreasing, or steady) for each product across the months.

• Line: A miniature line chart.

• Column: A miniature column chart.

• Win/Loss: Shows only positive (win) and negative (loss) values, useful for tracking gains and losses.

Going Further: Using AI with Excel's "Analyze Data"

Quick Analysis is an incredible time-saver, but its suggestions are based on predefined rules. It recommends chart types and formatting that are generally appropriate for your data structure. True AI-powered analysis goes a step further by actively looking for patterns, trends, and outliers you might not have thought to look for.

This is where Excel's Analyze Data feature comes in. Found on the Home tab of the ribbon, this tool uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze your dataset and generate unique insights.

Here’s how it differs and why it brings AI into the picture:

1. Automated Insights: While Quick Analysis offers tools, Analyze Data offers answers. It will automatically generate charts and observations for you, such as "Region 'East' has noticeably higher Sales" or "Sales for 'Product C' show an upward trend."

2. Natural Language Questions: This is the game-changer. Instead of building a PivotTable or a chart yourself, you can simply type a question in plain English. For example, you can ask, "average sales for product B" or "top 3 products by total sales," and Analyze Data will generate the answer instantly, often complete with a chart.

Putting the AI to the Test

Let's use our same sales data with Analyze Data.

1. Click anywhere inside your data table.

2. Go to the Home tab and click Analyze Data.

3. A pane will open on the right, instantly populated with suggested visuals and findings it discovered for you.

Next, try using the question box at the top of the pane. Ask it something specific:

"Which month had the highest sales?"

Excel will parse your sentence, run the calculation, and instantly give you the answer, saving you the steps of finding the maximum value yourself.

The combination of Quick Analysis and Analyze Data gives you two powerful layers. Use Quick Analysis for fast actions like adding data bars or creating a standard chart. Then, use Analyze Data to dig deeper, ask specific questions, and let AI hunt for insights you might have missed.

Final Thoughts

Excel's Quick Analysis tool is your go-to for speedy data exploration, offering smart shortcuts for formatting, charting, and summarizing your information. When combined with the AI-driven 'Analyze Data' feature, you're not just faster - you're smarter, letting Excel's algorithms pinpoint trends and answer questions in seconds.

While these tools are fantastic for analyzing data you already have in a spreadsheet, the real-world reporting challenge often involves pulling data from many different places first. If you spend your time downloading CSVs from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Salesforce, or Shopify and stitching them together in Excel, there's an easier way. Using Graphed, we help you connect all your marketing and sales data sources in one place. You can then use simple, natural language to ask questions and build live, interactive dashboards, automating the entire annual reporting process so you can focus on insights, not spreadsheets.