In the last video we saw that tables are quick and easy to create and that they have some very useful and versatile formatting options. But tables in Excel have many more benefits, and what's more, they're really easy to work with. To show you the differences between working with ranges and working with tables I have prepared a little playground for us on this worksheet. What you see here is our data in a table and then the same data in a range. Now let's look at some of the differences. Selecting data is something we do all the time so let's explore that first. To select a row in a table we have a number of options. We can select the first cell and then drag to the last or we click in the first cell and then shift click to the last. That works the same as in ranges but it can become rather tedious especially if your table is very large. But we have an additional feature in tables and that is a little black area that appears when we go into the first cell of a row in the table and click on it it perfectly selects our entire entry. Now I hear you say why don't you stick to using Control shift arrow to just select the data in your row. Well yes that does work until you encounter a blank cell and then it doesn't and that's the same for a table and a range. So to have this additional option of selecting just your data in a row it's very handy. It works the same way in a column as you can see. Here's the little black arrow, I click once and it has selected just the data. And a second click and it includes the header row. If you need to select all of the data in your table you can of course use control A and in a table, again this will give you the option of selecting only your data or with the second use of the shortcut. Include your header row. You can use the mouse to do this too. Move your mouse cursor into the top left hand corner until it turns into a little black diagonal arrow click once and you've selected your table data, click twice and you have included the header row in that selection. Now I hear you say again, control A works just fine inside a range. It does, you are right. However if you had to clear some content in your range, even if just temporarily, you can now no longer select your range with control A. And this is because you have broken that block of contiguous data. If you do the same thing in your table however, Excel will remember that this table represents one entity and when you use control A it will select all of your table. The reason for this behavior goes back to our discussion video about tables. Once you convert data into a table it effectively converts the rows in your table into database records. All the information in that record belongs together and Excel treats the cells accordingly. Wow, I hear you say, that's impressive. But wait, there's more. Now that we have a better understanding of how to work with tables let's go back to Uma's HR database. She's had to take some time off and when she got back she noticed that someone had made changes to her table and they aren't very good ones. It seems that somehow a number of records were duplicated. Well, let's fix this. Firstly, let's apply conditional formatting to the employee ID column to see how big the damage is. So we use the mouse pointer to select just the data in our column and then we go over to conditional formatting, highlight cell rules, duplicate values, and OK. There, now we're getting a better idea of what's going on. Now we could go ahead and manually remove these entries but I'm sure you've guessed it by now there is a much better way of doing this in our table. And the solution is located right here in the Design tab of the table tools. All you need to do is click on remove duplicates, confirm that Excel is looking in the right spot. Click OK and yes it found three duplicate values and it removed them for us. Perfect. Let's scroll down to the end to confirm this. I think we better leave the conditional formatting on just as a future safeguard. By the way, one last thing. Did you notice what happened at the top here? As soon as the headers of our table disappear when we scroll down the column row displays the head instead. No need to worry about freezing panes when you're working with tables. We have seen that tables makes selecting data much easier, that we no longer need to use freeze panes to keep the header row visible, and that it is no problem at all to remove duplicate entries from a table. And of course there is still more. In the next video we will discover how sorting and filtering tables works and we will also look at one of my favorite features of tables, the total row. So stay tuned.