Have you ever needed a quick count of clients or wondered what their average age is? The average age and more information can be found easily on the Excel Status Bar if properly set up.

Set your Status Bar

You can find the Status Bar at the bottom of the Excel Spreadsheet; see the orange rectangle below.

Right-click on the Status Bar to bring up the ‘Customize Status Bar’ window. Then click on the specific options you would like to display on the Status Bar.

For our purposes, add Average, Count, Numerical Count, Minimum (Min), Maximum (Max) and Sum to the Status Bar. They are shown in the orange box with the black check below.

Other helpful information to add to the Status Bar include View Shortcuts, Zoom Slider and Zoom. For descriptions of the Excel Status Bar options, click here.

Summarize your data

Once you have added options to the Status Bar to show the desired information, select the data you want to be summarized. This could be all or part of the data in a column(s).

The orange box in the Status Bar below shows a summary of the selected data in cells C2:C13.

Summary data tells us there are 12 clients (Count) with an average age of 42 (Average). The youngest client is 25 (Min), and the oldest is 77 (Max).

Pro Tip: For specific details about a subset of your data, try using the Sort feature with the tip above.

For example, what if you wanted to find the average age of clients in Grays Harbor? If your data was sorted by the county column, all clients from the same county will appear after each other. By then selecting the ages of those clients, summary data for this subset of data will appear on the Status Bar. Check out our previous newsletter article, Sorting, Filtering and Hiding Data in Excel, for more information about how to sort your data.

Did you know Word and PowerPoint have a Status Bar like Excel?! Different options are available for those programs, but you can find some helpful information displayed there.

We hope this article helps you love your data a little more!

* * * * *

Interested in learning more Excel tips? Check out other articles on the HMIS blog.

Want to sign up for our newsletter? Go to the HMIS website, scroll down until you see the ‘HMIS E-mail Updates’ heading in the right column, add your email address, then click ‘Submit.’