Excel University Blog

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Jeff Lenning

Combine Tables with Different Column Order

By Jeff Lenning | March 21, 2023 |

Combining data from multiple tables in Excel has historically been very manual … especially when the tables have different column orders. In this blog post, we’ll tackle this challenge by getting Excel to combine the tables with a formula that uses the VSTACK and CHOOSECOLS functions. Video Step by step Let’s use a basic example.…

Excel How To Combine Tables with a Single Formula

By Jeff Lenning | March 14, 2023 |

If you have ever tried to combine data from different tables manually, that is a lot of copy/paste! In this post, I’ll show you how to use Excel’s VSTACK function so you can do it instantly with a single formula. No copy/paste needed!! Video Step by Step Let’s say you have a table in Excel…

Excel How To Create Banded Rows

By Jeff Lenning | March 7, 2023 |

Creating banded rows in a Microsoft Excel table is a great way to make data easier to read and interpret. Banded rows can also be used to help separate and highlight important information. You don’t need to use VBA, Power Query, or manual formatting – you can do it quickly and easily with just a…

Excel Tips from 20 Experts

By Jeff Lenning | February 21, 2023 |

My friend John Michaloudis does an annual survey of Excel MVPs and experts and asks for their best Excel tip. He compiles the tips into an audio podcast along with show notes and related links. This is a great resource and I love sharing it every year. This year, he rounded up tips from: You’ll…

Skipping Excel 3

By Jeff Lenning | December 13, 2022 |

In this third and final post of the Skipping Excel series, we’ll connect all the dots and use Zapier to complete our automation. In case you are just joining the series … I’ve been documenting my journey for getting my e-commerce sales into QuickBooks Online. In an ideal situation, there would be a direct built-in…

Skipping Excel 2

By Jeff Lenning | November 29, 2022 |

In this post, the second in the Skipping Excel series, I’ll walk you through the details of the next iteration of this process. In case you are just joining this series, in the first post Skipping Excel 1, I reviewed the manual process of getting my e-commerce transactions into QuickBooks Online. It took about 30…

Skipping Excel 1

By Jeff Lenning | November 22, 2022 |

Excel is used for many different tasks, such as budgeting, reporting, comparing bank statements, and other things. It can also be used to export, clean, and import data between two separate systems. For example, suppose you export transactions from an e-commerce system, open them in Excel, tidy up the information a little, and then transfer…

CalCPA Article Instant Reconciliations

By Jeff Lenning | November 1, 2022 |

When you have two different lists that you need to compare, how do you do it? For example, you want to identify which items on one list (e.g., a check register) appear on the other (e.g. bank activity)? I used to print both lists, grab a ruler and go down row by row ticking items…

List of files in Excel (easy way, no VBA macros or formulas)

By Jeff Lenning | September 27, 2022 |

In this post, I’ll answer a question about how to create a list of files in a folder (and any subfolders) in Excel. For this illustration, we’ll use Power Query instead of VBA/Macros. Objective Before we jump into the details, let’s look at the objective. We want to create a list of files in a…

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.