Excel University Blog
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Excel
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…
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Man sitting at a desk with an open computer learning How to Clean Data in Excel
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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For the purposes of this discussion, an Excel dynamic chart is a chart that automatically updates itself whenever new data rows are added. The opposite is a static chart, which won’t incorporate any new data rows added to the existing range. To be clear, when Excel creates a chart based on a range of cells,…
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Are you a school administrator who wants to see how student test scores are distributed, or maybe an accountant who needs to analyze trends in spending or accounts receivable? If so, creating a frequency distribution in Excel is one of the easiest ways to do it! Essentially, frequency distributions come in handy whenever you need…
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