Excel University Blog
Read on for in-depth articles, tutorials, and videos. Search or browse for specific topics. Be sure to subscribe if you'd like to be notified when we write something new.
Posts
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
When a formula contains an invalid cell or range reference, the #REF! error is displayed. #REF! in Excel is short for reference, and you’ll usually see it pop up when cells that were referenced in formulas are deleted. They can be a nuisance, but they’re usually pretty simple to find and fix. Here’s how to…
Read More
Man sitting at a desk with an open computer learning How to Clean Data in Excel
Read More
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…
Read More
Have you ever wanted to see how many times a certain text string pops up in a set of data? While you can use Ctrl + F to find values, you may need a search feature that’s more discerning and responsive. Luckily, there are several (much faster!) ways you can count cells that contain specific…
Read More
Let’s say you’ve been building a worksheet to share with your coworkers. When you share it, they’ll be able to see, edit, and change everything that’s in the workbook, including your formulas. It can sometimes be a little too easy to make those changes accidentally. That’s why it’s a good idea to lock and even…
Read More
You might be surprised how much time is lost flipping between Excel workbooks trying to find information – especially if you have a lot to sort through. Learning how to merge Excel files will make finding information easier, faster, and more user-friendly (especially if you’re sharing workbooks). While you can use VBA to combine files,…
Read More
Excel contains plenty of options that make it easy to format cell values exactly how you want them: as a number, date, currency, percentage, and so on. Often, an individual cell contains only one type of value. But, there are actually some really simple ways to combine date and time values in Excel into a…
Read More
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…
Read More