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Most Recent Transaction Date

By Jeff Lenning | March 9, 2017 |

I recently received a question about how to find the most recent transaction date of a list of items. There are a few fun ways to accomplish this, and so I thought I’d walk through three options. Thanks Darrell for your question! Objective The exact question from Darrell is: “I have a data table of…

Clear the Input Cell Style for Printing

By Jeff Lenning | February 16, 2017 |

I really like to highlight input cells by applying the Input Cell Style. I also like to try to place all of the input cells for a workbook on a single worksheet. That way, it is easy to update the input cells, and since they aren’t on any of the sheets I need to print,…

Use Get & Transform to Reconcile Two Lists

By Jeff Lenning | February 2, 2017 |

In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query to help with our reconciliation. The idea for this post came from a question from Laura (thanks Laura!) The basic idea is that we have two worksheets. One contains the invoice totals and the other contains line item details, where there are many line items per…

Excel Dates and Times Article

By Jeff Lenning | January 5, 2017 |

Have you ever tried to do some type of calculation with a time value in Excel, only to receive a strange result? Two examples are adding up hours on a time sheet and multiplying the number of hours worked by a pay rate. If you’ve tried something like this and encountered an unexpected result, the…

Data Validation with ALL CAPS

By Jeff Lenning | November 10, 2016 |

In recent back-to-back webinars, two different attendees asked how to check to see if a user entered a text string with all caps. Specifically, they asked how to set up a data validation rule to determine if all letters are capitalized. So, I figured I would write a quick post about the technique. Objective Let’s just take a moment…

Daily Bank Balance with a PivotTable

By Jeff Lenning | October 20, 2016 |

When you download banking activity, you typically get the transactions, but not the daily bank balance. To compute the daily bank balance, you need to summarize the transactions by day and display a running total for all days, even those without any activity. This post demonstrates how to build such a report using a PivotTable. Overview…

Get & Transform Article

By Jeff Lenning | September 8, 2016 |

If you haven’t played with the Get & Transform commands in Excel 2016 for Windows, they’re probably worth checking out. I don’t want to sound overly dramatic here, but this set of capabilities is a game changer. These tools provide new ways to approach tasks, and enable us to do things that were previously time-consuming, impractical or required macros. If you’d like to…

Get & Transform: An Alternative to Copy Paste Append

By Jeff Lenning | September 1, 2016 |

Let’s say you have several data tables, and you need to combine them into a single table. One option would be to copy and paste to append them. But, depending on how many data tables there are, this type of manual process can be tedious. In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query…

Get & Transform: An Alternative to VLOOKUP List Comparisons

By Jeff Lenning | August 18, 2016 |

I recently received an Excel question about how to perform a specific list comparison, and I thought I’d demonstrate how to use a Get & Transform query as an alternative to the formula-based list comparisons typically performed with functions such as VLOOKUP and COUNTIFS. The original question is: “I am trying to use a list…

Get & Transform: An Alternative to Finding the Last Delimiter with Formulas

By Jeff Lenning | July 28, 2016 |

Sometimes, our data has multiple delimiters. Finding the first delimiter with formulas has been pretty easy over the years. Finding the final delimiter hasn’t been as easy…until now. In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query to grab the characters after the last delimiter. Objective Before we jump into the mechanics, let’s be clear about…