This is part of a series on enhancing your Excel skills. You’ll find links to other stories below.

Analysing a table of data can feel like a drag as you fiddle with formulas to glean important insights. Excel’s Analyse Data feature takes the hassle out of the process by creating a slew of suggested charts and tables for you and making it simple to extract useful information using natural language.

Here’s how to spot trends in your data without having to write a single formula.

Your goal: Analyse sales data from a bike-repair shop’s four regions to find trends and insights.

The old way: Create multiple charts for different views and summaries of your data, reorganising your table to optimise it for each chart.

The Analyse Data way: Let Excel create those charts and tables for you, offering various insights you can choose from.

The left side of the table below, for example, shows one month’s sales data for the bike-repair chain. (Each store sells complete bikes, tires and service kits.)

For automated insights, simply click anywhere in the table, then click Analyse Data in the Home toolbar. Excel slices and dices the table’s data, presenting the results in a new pane to the right:

Scrolling through the more than 20 results, you’ll find regional sales summaries, graphs of per-product revenue, regional comparisons and much more – a variety of visualisations that might have taken you hours to do manually! (Results in the Analyze Data pane don’t update automatically, so if you change any fields in your table, close the Analyse Data tool and restart it to see updated results.)

What’s more, you can pull any of these charts – and the custom data tables created for them – out of the sidebar to use them in Excel, Word or PowerPoint. Click the “+ Insert” text below an item to insert it (along with the relevant data from your original table) into a new sheet in your workbook.

Your goal: Find answers to questions about your data.

The old way: Create a custom formula that calculates the answer, which likely requires you to reorganise your table or create additional tables containing just the relevant data.

The Analyse Data way: Using natural language, simply ask Excel your question in the text box at the top of the Analyze Data pane. For the table above, you might ask: “Which Item Sold had the highest Revenue?” Excel tells you it was, perhaps surprisingly, back tires:

You can also enter queries involving multiple data fields, such as “What is the total Revenue of Mountain Bike and Street Bike?” or “What Region sold the least Quantity of Mountain Bike and Street Bike?” or “Quantity of Back Tire and Front Tire in the west Region?” Just be sure to include the actual name of the data field(s) in your query.

The Analyse Data pane also provides tools to exclude fields from analysis, as well as to confirm that Excel is treating each field correctly. To do so, click the settings (gear) button next to Discover Insights to bring up the “Which fields interest you the most?” dialogue:

For our bike-repair shop example, you can see that Analyse Data correctly identified the non-numerical fields, but you may want it to analyse Price as an average rather than a sum. Click Sum and choose Average; now you can type a query like “What is the Price by Region?” and see a chart of average price by region.