Excel University Blog
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Features
I recently wrote an article for the Minnesota Society of CPAs about a technique that helps you create budgets faster. Even if you don’t prepare budgets, the underlying features and functions used can be applied elsewhere. In summary, we use a data validation drop-down to provide several Budget Methods. Once you select a budget method…
Let’s say you need to take an amount and split it evenly into monthly columns. For example, perhaps you need to recognize revenue over time. Or, perhaps you have spent some money and you need to allocate the expense over time. There are other illustrations, but the basic idea is that you have a total…
In this post, we’ll discuss one approach for retrieving the first occurrence (or min date) after a specified date. Let me back up. Michael asked for a way to find the first occurrence of an office visit (a date) after the date of being discharged from the hospital (and within 30 days). As this is…
This post will demonstrate how to insert the same few items into a list and create a new row for each item (or each combination, if multiple items). For example, let’s say we have a list of some sort … we’ll use a list of T-Shirts for this illustration. We have a few T-Shirt options…
Flash Fill is a marvelous feature that is designed to fill values down based on an example in an adjacent column. That is, you have a column of values and then you enter an example of a derived value in an adjacent column. Flash Fill attempts to recognize the pattern from your example and then…
In this post, we’ll discuss a way to simulate using VLOOKUP to return multiple matching rows and/or columns. What do you mean by “simulate” Jeff? Well, VLOOKUP is designed to return a single value, not multiple values. That is, VLOOKUP scans down the lookup range and stops at the first matching row … ignoring any…
Excel is big … really big. It has hundreds of functions and features, but which of these have the most potential to save time and help us work faster? The answer depends on what you’re working on. For common accounting and finance tasks, I believe the following 10 Excel skills can help improve the efficiency…
This is the second post in the Battle of Heavyweights series, where we are comparing VLOOKUP to SUMIFS in order to understand their key differences. Knowing these key differences will help us determine which to use in a given workbook. In the previous post, we were introduced to VLOOKUP. Now, it is time to meet…
A few years ago, I wrote a post about how to perform fuzzy lookups using the “Fuzzy Lookup Add-In for Excel.” However, this capability is now available in Power Query!! Wait, what? Yes! Performing a fuzzy match is so much easier and far more intuitive in Power Query. This post walks through the basics ……
Microsoft recently updated the built-in tools for retrieving stock quotes into Excel. If you’re typing closing prices into Excel manually, my recent California CPA Magazine article may be able to help you get it done faster. Specifically, it talks about how the Stock data type retrieves current quotes and related information, and how Power Query…