Excel University Blog

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Posts

Hide and Unhide Multiple Sheets

By Jeff Lenning | April 6, 2021 |

Hiding a single worksheet from view is fairly straightforward … you can right-click the tab and select Hide. Hiding multiple worksheets at the same time is also fairly straightforward. You select multiple sheets by holding down Ctrl or Shift, and then right-click and select Hide. It is also fairly straightforward to Unhide a single sheet.…

Pivot Text Values with Power Query

By Jeff Lenning | March 23, 2021 |

In this post, we’ll talk about how to Pivot text values with Power Query. We would like to do this even if there are a variable number of fields per record. This can be REALLY hard to visualize based on a short text description, so I think it is best to show screenshots of the…

Split Column Headers from Values

By Jeff Lenning | March 9, 2021 |

I was recently asked how to separate multiple column headers from their values. My favorite tool for transforming data like this is Power Query. So, this post walks through the steps with Power Query. Thanks Ron for your question! Objective Before we get into the steps, let’s visualize the start and end points. Ron states…

Slow to Fast 3

By Jeff Lenning | February 22, 2021 |

This is the final post in the Slow to Fast series, where we are incrementally improving the efficiency of reconciliations. In the first post, we looked at conditional formatting. This was a great option when the lists were relatively short, stored on the same worksheet, and only required us to look at a single column.…

Slow to Fast 2

By Jeff Lenning | February 15, 2021 |

This is the second post in the Slow to Fast series, where we are taking incremental steps to improving our reconciliations. In the first post we improved a purely manual process with conditional formatting. That approach works when the lists are relatively small, on the same sheet, and when we are only concerned with a…

Slow to Fast 1

By Jeff Lenning | February 8, 2021 |

This is the first post in the Slow to Fast series, where we will incrementally improve the task of comparing two lists (commonly called a reconciliation). The illustration I’ll use is a bank reconciliation. We want to compare the list of checks in our accounting system with the list of checks from our bank download.…

Automatically Format Rows

By Jeff Lenning | January 26, 2021 |

I was recently asked how to set up conditional formatting to format a row based on the value in a column. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to create a conditional formatting rule that automatically formats a row based on a single column value for all rows in the worksheet. Thanks Karla for your question!…

Tips from 31 Excel Experts

By Jeff Lenning | December 28, 2020 |

My friend John has put together his annual podcast featuring tips from 31 Excel experts. It is an astounding collection and I hope you get a chance to check it out! https://www.myexcelonline.com/podcast/028-the-best-microsoft-excel-tips-tricks-in-2020/

Aggregate with OR Logic

By Jeff Lenning | December 14, 2020 |

The family of IFS functions, such as SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, use AND logic when evaluating multiple conditions. In other words, all conditions must be true to be included. And generally, this logic works well. However, there are situations when we’d like to use OR logic instead. That is, any of the conditions can be true…

List of Workbook Tables and References

By Jeff Lenning | December 8, 2020 |

John asked if there was a way to create a list of all table names in the workbook, along with the underlying table reference. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how this can be accomplished with Power Query and an Excel formula. Objective Before we get into the mechanics, let’s confirm our goal here. We have…