The Data Type feature in Excel is a remarkable tool for collection information about countries or or stock exchange. However, the term ‘Data Type’ might be a bit misleading as it does not relate to traditional computer data types such as strings, dates, integers, longs, etc.
How to connect to Data Type in Excel
To use this tool, you must have Excel 365 and an active web connection. Its principle is to collect information stored by Microsoft.
Consider an example in which you need to calculate the new prices of your products based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI). To avoid spending hours searching the net for this information, you can simply use Data Type.
- List the names of countries in your cells.
- Select your cells
- Activate the tool Data > Data Type > Geography
- After a few seconds, an icon appears in the cells, indicating that the connection to the database has been established.
Open the card
The card is the name of all the infomations related to a country. To open it, simply put your mouse over the icon and click on it
How to collect data
Once the icon is visible in the cells, you can add properties by clicking on the icon Insert Data. There, you select the property you want to add.
You can see that the formula return the result is super simple
=A2.CPI
But the best technique is to add you data inside a Table. Like that, when you add a Data Type value, automatically the column header is the name you have selected.
Nested Data Type with Geography
Something absolutely amazing is the property Subdivision. For instance, you want to add extract all the States of the USA. In this situation, you will add only one country name with the Data Type because like that, the States will be added in many cells.
As you can see, automatically, the icon is added next to each state’s name. Like that, you can add properties according each states 😀👍
