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
If you have ever downloaded bank activity from your bank’s website, you know there is some amount of cleaning you need to do before the data is ready to use. Perhaps the next step is to summarize the bank activity with a PivotTable, or, perhaps to perform a bank rec. Regardless of your ultimate objective,…
Using the Data Model (or Power Pivot) helps us build some amazing PivotTables. A date table (or calendar table) is integral to most data models as they allow us to group reports by various date periods and use a wide variety of time intelligence functions. Although there are many ways to build such a date…
If you like shortcuts, features, and tools that can save you time in Excel, I’d like to call your attention to a Journal of Accountancy article that includes tips from several Excel experts. I’m honored that my tips were included in the article 🙂 The article includes these main categories of tips: Keyboard shortcuts Quick…
Comparing lists is a fairly common task in Excel, and as with anything, there are many ways to approach it. When we compare two lists, we are essentially trying to find out which names appear in both lists, or, which names appear in only one list. Tony posted a blog comment about how to perform…
Psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a line that is often referred to as Maslow’s Hammer. It goes something like this: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” I’ve heard the simplified version more often: “If all you have is a…
I love PivotTables, and use them all the time. But, when our needs are simple, we can easily summarize data with a Get & Transform query instead. Why? To simplify our workbooks and improve our efficiency. Let me demonstrate. Objective Before we dig into the mechanics, let’s just be clear about our goal. Let’s say…
Do you love FlashFill? Do you love Get & Transform queries? If so, you’ll love the most recent Excel update pushed out by Microsoft: New Column by Example. It is essentially FlashFill inside PowerQuery. It is way cool. Check it out. Objective Let’s say we have some data. It doesn’t matter where it is, it…
Imagine this scenario: There are 120 CSV files in a folder on your network. Each CSV export contains the transactions for a single month, and there are 10 years’ worth of files. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to combine all of the transactions in these 120 files into a single Excel…
Recently, I’ve been on this kick of using Get & Transform queries to accomplish tasks that we previously performed with other methods. It is clear that the Get & Transform commands provide new ways to solve old problem. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how we can use a Get & Transform query to transpose values.…
Alright my friends, this week I’ll tackle a question I received about retrieving values from workbooks. Here is the basic idea of the question. I have a folder with several hundred workbooks, and each workbook may contain any number of worksheets. For example, some workbooks have two sheets, some have three sheets, and some have…