In this video I’ll show you how to create a currency converter in Excel using the Data Types feature. If you’re not familiar with Data Types you can learn about them here. If you are, feel free to jump straight to the video.
Rich Data Types, first introduced into Excel in 2018, are a game-changer that takes Excel from being a tool that simply manipulates your data into a tool that really understands your data.
Traditionally, a cell in an Excel worksheet has been limited to storing one of three data types – text, numbers and dates. However, with the introduction of Rich Data Types, this is no longer the case. Converting a static value stored in a cell into a Rich Data Type opens up a whole new exciting world of possibilities.
Imagine you have a cell that contains the name of a company or a city or a country. With a couple of mouse clicks the static text entry in that cell can be converted into an AI-powered Rich Data Type that exposes additional information such as market value and number of employees (company) or population, area and even photographs (city/country).
That additional information can be used in the formulas you write, charts you create, it can even be used to change how you sort and filter.
Now apply the same principle to data inside your organisation such as Products and Employees. Imagine, for example creating invoices or inventory lists replete with images from product and customer data without having to load it into Excel first.
With Rich Data Types, a single cell value can have a live connected set of information you can quickly pull into your decision-making process, without needing to constantly go back to the original source to find more information.
This video uses the Currency Data Type from which you can extract information such as Currency Name and Exchange Rate and this forms the basis of the tutorial