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.
Features
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.…
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.…
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!…
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…
This post shows how to create multiple dependent drop downs using the FILTER function. These are also known as cascading or conditional drop downs, where the choices in a drop down depend on the selection made in a previous drop down. The technique presented enables you to create as many drop downs as you need,…
This is the third post in the Treasure Maps series where we are talking about various ways to implement mapping tables. In this series, we are using mapping tables to help translate labels between the data and the report. In the first post, we used SUMIFS to pull the values into the mapping table. In…
This is the second post in the Treasure Maps series, where we are discussing various ways to implement mapping tables. In the first post, we covered SUMIFS. In this post, we’ll talk about Power Query. Overview Let’s say we have a list of transactions in a CSV file, like this: We would like to use…
Historically, we have created calculated columns by writing formulas. In this post, we’ll see that in some cases, clicking a few buttons in Power Query can be a nice alternative. Objective Before we get into the mechanics, let’s confirm our objective. Let’s say we have a table full of transactions, like this: We would like…
Let’s say we want to retrieve historical stock quotes for a specific security into Excel. Since this is Excel, there are of course several options. Before the STOCKHISTORY function, we could pull data from relevant web pages using Power Query (which I’ve written about before here). But, the most current versions of Excel now have…
This is the third post in the Dynamic Arrays series. In the first two posts, we discussed the spill range and the spill reference operator. If you’ve enjoyed the first two posts, I think you’ll enjoy this one even more because we get to talk about the FILTER and XLOOKUP functions. Video Overview So far,…