How to Automate Excel Reports

Manually updating the same Excel report every Monday morning is probably not what you planned for your week. Downloading CSVs, copying and pasting data, correcting formats, and updating pivot tables - it's a necessary but tedious process that drains hours of your time. This article will show you several ways to automate your Excel reports so you can set them up once and let them run on their own, saving you time and reducing the risk of manual errors.

Why Bother Automating Your Excel Reports?

Before jumping into the "how," let's quickly cover the "why." It's tedious, but the cost goes beyond boredom. A weekly reporting process that takes three hours manually turns into 12 hours a month or over 150 hours of work a year - that's nearly a full month of your time spent just updating spreadsheets.

Automating your reports delivers some immediate benefits:

• Saves a ton of time: Once you set up an automated process, generating a report can take minutes or seconds - not hours. This frees you up to focus on actually analyzing the insights, not just compiling the data.
• Improves data accuracy: Every time a human copies, pastes, or manually edits data, there's a chance for errors, typos, or formatting issues to be introduced. Automation will perform the same exact steps right each time.
• Ensures consistency: Automated reporting follows the same logic, steps, and formatting rules every time, which is great for everyone involved.
• Provides timely insights: You and your team can get reports done a lot quicker and make decisions sooner without waiting for manual data wrangling.

Method 1: Master Data Cleanup and Imports with Power Query

If you learn anything from this article, it should be the power of the Power Query tool in Excel. Known as "Get and Transform Data," it is a powerful feature baked right into Excel. Essentially, it's a data transformation tool that records the steps you take with your data once and then automatically applies those steps every time you update with new data.

What is Power Query?

Power Query lets you connect to different kinds of data sources (like other Excel workbooks, CSV files, web pages, SQL servers, etc.), pull in the data, and then clean and prepare it using a graphical interface without writing a single line of code.

Every step you take to clean your data - removing columns, filtering rows, changing data types - is recorded by the Power Query editor and can be reused over and over. This is how you automate those first tedious steps in your report processing: data cleaning and preparation.

Step-by-Step Guide to Using Power Query Automation:

Imagine you get a weekly sales export data file in CSV format. Each new file might have some empty rows, extra columns you don't need, and mixed-up date formats. You can automate the entire cleaning process using Power Query.

1. Connect to Your Data Source

First, open an Excel workbook and go to the Data tab. Click Get Data (from Power Query) > From File > From Text/CSV. Browse for your file, then click 'Import'.

This opens the Power Query Editor, and you'll see a preview of your data with Power Query making some best guesses on how to structure it.

2. Cleaning and Transforming Your Data

Once in the Power Query editor window, you can begin cleaning up your data with a few button clicks.

• Remove Unnecessary Columns: Select the columns you want to get rid of (hold Ctrl to select multiple), right-click the header, and click 'Remove Columns'.
• Filter Data by Rows: Use the down arrow on column headers to remove null values or filter for specific data points, just like using Excel filters.

Every action you take here will be recorded and added to the 'Applied Steps' list on the right-hand side of the window. It's like a little recipe for your data transformations, and you can click on past steps to see how the data looked or delete steps if needed.

• Fix Data Types: Ensure each column has the correct data type. Click the type icon next to each column header (for example, "ABC" for text, "1, 2, 3" for whole numbers, and a calendar for dates) and pick the appropriate one.

3. Load Your Data and Close Power Query Editor

When you're done cleaning, click the button that looks like 'Close and Load' in the upper corner of the Power Query Editor window. Your freshly cleaned and transformed data will get loaded into your Excel worksheet as a nicely formatted Excel Table.

4. The Magic: Hit the Refresh Button

The next week, when you save another weekly report in the same folder (preferably overwriting the old one), you don't need to repeat those previous steps again. All you have to do is go to the 'Data' tab in Excel, find the ‘Refresh All’ button, and click it. Power Query will run your entire 'recipe' of cleaned-up steps on the fresh CSV data automatically, and in just a few moments, your Excel table will be up to date.

Automating Your Pivot Table to Make it Dynamic and Interactive

Now that you have your clean data from Power Query, it's cool to build your summarized reports or dashboards on it. Nothing beats a pivot table for that. When you combine Power Query and Pivot Tables, you're creating a report that will refresh itself whenever there's new data, which is the definition of ‘Automated Reporting!’

How to Make Your Pivot Table Update Automatically

Once your cleaned-up data from Power Query has been loaded onto the Excel sheet as a table, click on one of its cells, and select the ‘Insert’ option from the ribbon. Click on 'Pivot Table,' and it should choose your Power Query Table as your Source Data automatically.

Build your Pivot Table just like you always do, with rows and values dragged into their respective areas. The difference is that whenever you refresh data through Power Query (Data > Refresh All in Excel), your Pivot Table will refresh right behind it. You don't have to rebuild it or edit the data source range anymore.

Try Adding Some Slicers to Interact with Your Dashboard

Slicers are like buttons that can filter your Pivot Tables in a pretty and easy way without opening the Pivot Table field list menu. They're great if you want to give your work to someone else on the team who might not be a Pivot Table whiz.

After you build your Pivot Table, make sure you have some of its cells highlighted and select the ‘PivotTable Analyze’ tab in the ribbon, then choose 'Insert Slicer'. You will get a little checkbox list with all your data fields - just click the ones you want to create slicer buttons for, like sales rep or period and category. That will give you nice, clickable boxes right on your worksheet.

Method 3: Automating Tasks Using Macros

While Power Query is for importing and cleaning up data, Macros are for automating tasks inside your Excel workbook. A Macro is a set of actions (like button clicks, keyboard typing, formatting changes) that Excel remembers so you can do them later with just a click of the mouse.

When Exactly Do You Use Macros?

Macros are great for repetitive formatting or exporting steps you do every time you update your report. Things like:

• Applying the company’s logos, brand colors, and font styles.
• Rearranging columns by hiding some or even moving others.
• Exporting your finalized sheets into PDF or emailing it to team members.

How to Record Your First Macro

You don't even need to know anything about VBA programming, which is what Macros really are, because Excel’s got a great little 'Macro Recorder'. It watches and records your actions, then translates them into VBA code for you.

1. First, you'll have to enable the Developer Tab if it's not showing up. Go to File > Options, 'Customize Ribbon', and check the box beside 'Developer'.
2. Then, on the Developer tab, click the 'Record Macro' button, give your macro a unique name (like “format_Report_Weekly”), and then press OK.
3. Now, you've got your macro in recording mode, so everything you do Excel will record. Go on with the tasks you want to automate, such as changing the font colors, making the header columns bold, adjusting the widths, and stuff like that.
4. When you've finished, click on 'Stop Recording' in the Developer tab.

Final Thoughts

You don't have to spend your whole workweek doing manual Excel reporting. Using tools like Power Query for your data preparation and cleaning, Pivot Tables, or learning a bit of Macros for formatting and repetitive tasks, you can build an automated workflow that saves you a ton of time and reduces errors to get insights to your team faster.

While automating Excel workflows is an important first step, sometimes the biggest problem is that your data doesn't start in an Excel sheet to begin with. Our data is often scattered all over the place, in Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, your Shopify dashboard, and your CRM software too. Graphed makes it so that you don't have to worry about this at all anymore. We connect your data sources together. Once you ask your questions, we build dashboards and reports with live data updates - instead of fighting with CSVs and VLOOKUPS, you can simply ask a question in plain English, and we'll build your whole dashboard for you in seconds!