Excel University Blog

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Jeff Lenning

Excel Breakout Puzzles!

By Jeff Lenning | July 26, 2017 |

Are you aware of the Escape Room trend, or the similar breakout logic puzzles that teachers use in classrooms? Here is the basic idea of the escape room. You and some friends or colleagues go to a company that has created an escape room. Like, in the real world, physically, you go to a place.…

2017 Excel University Scholarship Winners

By Jeff Lenning | July 13, 2017 |

I am thrilled to announce this year’s Excel University scholarship winners! These scholarships are supported by Excel University enrollments, so thanks to all of you who have helped make these awards possible! Both of our winners this year are great examples of the type of accounting student that the scholarship program was designed to assist.…

Skipping Excel CalCPA Article

By Jeff Lenning | July 6, 2017 |

Excel is used for all sorts of things, including budgeting, reporting, reconciling bank statements and more. Sometimes, it’s used as a bridge between two applications … that is, to export, clean and import data between two different systems. This type of process is so common it even has its own acronym: ETL (Extract, Transform and…

FlashFill Meets Get & Transform

By Jeff Lenning | June 20, 2017 |

Do you love FlashFill? Do you love Get & Transform queries? If so, you’ll love the most recent Excel update pushed out by Microsoft: New Column by Example. It is essentially FlashFill inside PowerQuery. It is way cool. Check it out. Objective Let’s say we have some data. It doesn’t matter where it is, it…

Mind Blown CalCPA Article

By Jeff Lenning | June 1, 2017 |

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 in these 120 files into a single Excel…

VLOOKUP vs INDEX-MATCH

By Jeff Lenning | May 25, 2017 |

There are numerous lookup functions in Excel, and often, their capabilities overlap. And, that is true with many things in Excel…there are often multiple ways to accomplish any given task. Performing lookups is no exception. So, how are we supposed to know which lookup function to use? Often, Excel users try to decide between VLOOKUP…

Learn Macros with the VBA Pro Guest Lecture

By Jeff Lenning | May 4, 2017 |

I’m happy to announce the immediate availability of Excel University’s newest guest lecture: VBA Pro by Jon Acampora. Earn 16 CPE hours while learning how to have macros do your work for you…what could be better? Macros offer the biggest opportunity for automation in Excel, and can help you get your work done faster. And…

Use a Get & Transform Query to Transpose Values

By Jeff Lenning | April 26, 2017 |

Recently, I’ve been on this kick of using Get & Transform queries to accomplish tasks that we previously performed with other methods. It is clear that the Get & Transform commands provide new ways to solve old problem. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how we can use a Get & Transform query to transpose values.…

Retrieve Values from Many Workbooks

By Jeff Lenning | April 6, 2017 |

Alright my friends, this week I’ll tackle a question I received about retrieving values from workbooks. Here is the basic idea of the question. I have a folder with several hundred workbooks, and each workbook may contain any number of worksheets. For example, some workbooks have two sheets, some have three sheets, and some have…

Most Recent Transaction Date

By Jeff Lenning | March 9, 2017 |

I recently received a question about how to find the most recent transaction date of a list of items. There are a few fun ways to accomplish this, and so I thought I’d walk through three options. Thanks Darrell for your question! Objective The exact question from Darrell is: “I have a data table of…