Excel University Blog
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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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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,…
Long lists of data can be time-consuming to enter in Excel. Here’s how to use the Excel fill handle to save yourself hours of work!
Even if you’ve been using Excel for a while, you may find yourself Googling how to use or access certain features. For example, if you rarely need to convert units of measurement, you might forget the function that does that for you. We’ve put together a list of very common Excel questions that you can…
Keeping your records organized is essential whether you’re running a business or taking care of the household. These days, there are a ton of apps you can use to keep track of daily to-dos, but they just can’t quite compare to the customization abilities and advanced features of Excel. One of those features is the…