Excel University Blog
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Posts
Since many of Excel’s features are designed to work with data stored in a flat, tabular format, we sometimes need to flatten data that is received in other formats. In a previous post, we discussed a manual way to flatten data. In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform Query as an alternative to…
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Excel 2016 includes a set of features called Get & Transform. In previous versions of Excel, these capabilities were included in the Power Query Add-In. In this post, we’ll see how a Get & Transform Query can be used as an alternative to a VBA macro. Overview Here is the scenario. We export data out of…
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In this post, we’ll create a drop-down that contains a unique list of choices derived from a column that contains duplicate values. This may sound familiar as we previously accomplished this with a PivotTable. However, the Power Query feature that’s built-in to Excel 2016 makes this process easier. Objective We have a data table that contains RepID,…
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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. Check out…
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Excel easily summarizes flat, tabular data. When data is stored in a crosstab style format instead, Excel users have to spend a bit of time preparing the data for use. There are many ways to accomplish just about any Excel task, but in this post, I’ll demonstrate how to quickly unpivot the data. Thanks to Patrick who…
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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. Today, I use Excel hyperlinks instead. Check out this CalCPA Technology and Business Resource Guide article where I describe how to use Excel hyperlinks to cross-reference digital…
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I recently had the immense pleasure of being a guest on the My Excel Online Podcast with John Michaloudis. He is a PivotTable master and an Excel friend. If you’d like to listen to the audio interview, I’ve provided the link below. While you are there, be sure to subscribe to John’s podcast, he does an amazing…
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In this post, I’ll answer a question submitted by reader Chérie about sorting by color. The basic question is this. “I have created a color coded list, where yes=green, no=red, maybe=orange, and other is any other color. How can I sort the list so that all the yes rows are first, then no, then maybe,…
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Excel users often spend a bunch of time applying the same format to number cells. Some numbers are stored values and others are calculated with formulas. The task of manually applying the same format to all of the numbers in the worksheet, especially when the numbers aren’t in a continuous range, can feel quite repetitive.…
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Excel users find themselves making the same customizations over and over again. This post demonstrates how to store customizations such as cell formatting, headers, print preferences, the default PivotTable style, and cell styles, in a template workbook. Plus, we’ll see how the name and location of the template determines when it is used, and, if it…
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