Publications

Stop Doing Manual Tasks Excel can do Faster Imagine this scenario: There are 120 CSV files in a folder on your network. Each CSV export contains the transactions for a single month, and there are 10 years’ worth of files. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to combine all of the transactions…

Have you ever tried to do some type of calculation with a time value in Excel, only to receive a strange result? Two examples are adding up hours on a time sheet and multiplying the number of hours worked by a pay rate. If you’ve tried something like this and encountered an unexpected result, the…

If you haven’t played with the “Get & Transform” commands in Excel 2016 for Windows, they’re  probably worth checking out. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic here, but this set of capabilities is a game changer. These tools provide new ways to approach tasks, and enable us to do things that were previously time-consuming, impractical or required macros. Formerly available as the “Power…

If you get stock quotes into Excel by typing or copy/pasting from your web browser, you may be able to get your work done faster if you use a built-in Excel feature. Excel’s external data feature enables you to retrieve data from a variety of sources—one of which happens to provide stock quotes. Let’s check it out. In any blank worksheet,…

Back in the old days, when I used workpapers that were made with, you know, paper, I used a red pencil to create cross-references that made it easy to navigate to related documents. I  remember feeling very organized because every document was indexed and part of a collection. Now, things are different. I get annoyed when I need to print something. And, when…

Microsoft recently released Office 2016, and with it, the next version of my favorite program—which is, of course, Excel. The user interface is about the same as 2013 and you’ll feel right at home. Microsoft focused on expanding Excel’s data visualization capabilities by introducing several new chart types and on Excel’s ability to import and transform…

If you haven’t checked out Excel’s conditional formatting feature recently, you’re missing out on some nice enhancements. The feature formats a cell based on its value. Excel continuously monitors the cell value and updates the formatting as the cell value changes. Conditional formatting has traditionally been limited to basic cell formatting such as fill and…

There are often several ways in Excel to accomplish any goal. For example, when building reports, we can use formulas or PivotTable. When building a formula-based report, we typically set up the report labels as desired and then write Excel formulas to compute the amount values and subtotals. This is a terrific approach when we…

Have you ever had two lists in Excel and wondered what items on one list appear on the other? For example, you’ve exported a check register from your accounting system and downloaded activity from your bank’s website, and you simply wanted to know which checks cleared the bank. That is, which checks on the checklist…

How do you know your workbook is accurate? This question is important because it’s our responsibility to ensure that data flows properly through the workbook, with numbers that tie out, and with reports that are internally consistent. One way to help ensure workbook accuracy is by creating a worksheet within the workbook dedicated to this…