Excel University Blog

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CHOOSE

Excel How To VLOOKUP Left (3 ways)

By Jeff Lenning | April 4, 2023 |

If you’ve used the VLOOKUP function before, you know that the lookup column is expected to be in the leftmost column within the range. Meaning, it’s going to look for a value in the leftmost column within the range and once it finds its match, it will shoot to the right to return the related…

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Convert Foreign Currencies to USD

By Penny Li | January 4, 2022 |

My name is Penny Li, a cross-border tax accountant, and I often come across instances in my work where I need to convert foreign currencies to US dollar. I have decided to build a foreign currency conversion tool in Excel that is capable of generating single-day as well as average foreign exchange rates for multiple…

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Excel Calendar with One Formula

By Jeff Lenning | October 20, 2021 |

In this post, we’ll see how to create an Excel calendar with a single formula. Specifically, we will write a formula that displays the days of any month in a graphical calendar format. Our graphical calendar displays the days of the specified month in 7 columns (Sunday through Saturday) and includes a row for each…

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Excel and Budgeting

By Jeff Lenning | May 19, 2020 |

I recently wrote an article for the Minnesota Society of CPAs about a technique that helps you create budgets faster. Even if you don’t prepare budgets, the underlying features and functions used can be applied elsewhere. In summary, we use a data validation drop-down to provide several Budget Methods. Once you select a budget method…

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CHOOSE or SWITCH

By Jeff Lenning | June 3, 2019 |

For decades, Excel users have had the CHOOSE function and it has been able to power some wonderful formulas. But recently, we received the SWITCH function which provides much more flexibility. From a high level, both functions enable us to analyze a value and then return various results based on that value. But, SWITCH offers…

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Pick the Math with Excel’s CHOOSE Function

By Jeff Lenning | August 8, 2013 |

Have you ever wanted to allow the workbook user to pick the math that a formula should use?  This post explores the CHOOSE function, which, among other things, enables us to allow the user to pick the math. CHOOSE Before jumping right into the function’s syntax, let’s get a little context.  Let’s say that we…

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