Before you ditch Excel in favor of an alternative, make sure to implement a few strategic techniques to handle such large datasets easily and unlock their true potential in no time.

Preliminary Setup As I mentioned in my post on how to format tables in Excel, before I do anything with raw data, I format it as a table.

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to populate a dropdown with data on another sheet. I’m using Microsoft 365 desktop on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use older .xlsx versions.

SEE: Explore 6 ways to save time using Flash Fill in Microsoft Excel. How to use Power Query to parse data in Microsoft Excel Power Query is available to Microsoft Excel 2010 users and later.