Excel University Blog

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CONCATENATE

Excel How To Join or Combine Text (3 ways)

By Jeff Lenning | October 3, 2023 |

Welcome to this tutorial on combining text in Excel! In this post, we will explore three different ways to join or combine text values in Excel. Whether you want to use Flash Fill, concatenation, or the TEXTJOIN function, we will cover them all. So let’s get started! Video Step-by-step Tutorial The objective of this tutorial…

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Use an Excel formula to insert pictures into cells with the IMAGE function

By Jeff Lenning | September 6, 2022 |

Microsoft recently announced the rollout of the new IMAGE function. It enables us to write a formula that inserts an image directly into a cell. This opens up many new interesting possibilities.

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CONCATENATE or CONCAT

By Jeff Lenning | July 1, 2019 |

Quick question: how do we combine or join values from multiple cells to create one big text string? We’ve been able to use the concatenation operator (&) or the CONCATENATE function for decades. The CONCATENATE function has been a great friend over the years, and has enabled some wonderful formulas. But, now there’s a new…

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VLOOKUP Hack #7: Different Columns

By Jeff Lenning | December 6, 2017 |

In this post, we’ll continue hacking the 1st argument. Here is the basic setup. We are building a report. The report structure uses multiple columns to store the report labels, such as sales, cost of sales, selling expenses, and so on. So, can we write a formula that works when the lookup values are stored…

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Beyond Numbers CalCPA Article

By Jeff Lenning | October 11, 2017 |

Often when we use Excel, we think of its ability to operate on numbers. But, Excel is also good at operating on other data types, such as dates and text strings. When we limit our use of formulas to numbers only, we miss out on many opportunities for efficiency. In this article, I’ll talk about…

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Dynamic Date Report Header For The Period Ending

By Jeff Lenning | March 27, 2014 |

As a general rule, it is a good idea to delegate as many tasks to Excel as possible. Report headers are no exception, especially for recurring-use workbooks. This post explores the functions needed to create a dynamic report header, such as “For the Period Ending December 31, 2015.” Overview Let’s assume we use the same…

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Pull Budget Values into an Income Statement

By Jeff Lenning | February 13, 2014 |

In this post, we explore a way to pull budget values into an income statement exported from QuickBooks, and demonstrate how to handle the fact that the extract uses new columns to indent. Overview When the budget and actual data reside in the same application, creating a variance report is easy. However, when the actual…

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VLOOKUP on Two or More Criteria Columns

By Jeff Lenning | January 10, 2014 |

If you have ever tried to use a VLOOKUP function with two or more criteria columns, you’ve quickly discovered that it just wasn’t built for that purpose. Fortunately, there is another function that may work as an alternative to VLOOKUP depending on what you want to return. Video Multi-Column Lookup Objective First, let’s confirm our…

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