Excel University Blog

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Features

How To Automate Your Workflow

By Jeff Lenning | January 28, 2025 |

Are you ready to save hours of manual work each week? In this guide, we’ll explore how to automate your workflow in Excel using tools like Power Query, Pivot Tables, and Pivot Charts. Best of all, you don’t need to be a coding wizard to get started. By the end, you’ll know how to effortlessly…

Rows of Dependent Drop Downs

By Jeff Lenning | January 14, 2025 |

When working with drop down lists in Excel, creating dependent drop downs that dynamically adapt based on a primary choice is both powerful and time-saving. This post walks through setting up rows of dependent drop downs and concludes with a method to notify users when a secondary choice becomes invalid. Let’s dive in! Video Step-by-step…

Conditionally Format Input Cells

By Jeff Lenning | January 7, 2025 |

Hello, Excel enthusiasts! Today, we’re diving into a neat trick: automatically formatting input cells based on whether they meet specific criteria. The goal? Identify and format cells where the first digit of the input is a “4.” But, you can apply this same technique to other criteria. By the end of this post, you’ll have a clear…

Automatic Check Boxes

By Jeff Lenning | December 31, 2024 |

Have you ever wondered how to set up checkboxes in Excel that check themselves automatically based on the value of another cell? Whether you’re tracking tasks, orders, or reviews, Excel’s checkbox feature can streamline your process. In this blog post, we’ll walk through step-by-step examples to create self-checking checkboxes. Let’s dive in! Video Step-by-step Tutorial…

Highlight Incorrect Answers

By Jeff Lenning | December 17, 2024 |

Hi there! Today, we’re diving into the following Excel question: How do I highlight incorrect answers in a worksheet? It’s a great topic because conditional formatting is such a powerful tool for visualizing data in real time. Whether you’re creating a quiz, a workbook for training, or just need to check values against an answer…

Formula to Remove Duplicates

By Jeff Lenning | December 10, 2024 |

Removing duplicates in Excel is a common task, but what if you want more control than the Remove Duplicates command provides? Maybe you need a formula to handle duplicates dynamically. In this guide, we’ll cover how to remove duplicates from a single column, handle multiple columns, and use formulas for various scenarios like summing, finding…

Allow Specific Section to be Edited

By Jeff Lenning | November 12, 2024 |

In this post, I’ll walk through the steps for how to allow users to edit specific cells in an Excel worksheet and lock down other cells. This is a useful feature when you want to protect certain data while still allowing users to make changes to other parts of your sheet. Ready? Let’s dive in!…

ChatGPT Unprotected a Worksheet

By Jeff Lenning | November 5, 2024 |

I recently discovered that you can upload an Excel file to ChatGPT, ask it to perform tasks on the file, and then download the updated file. In this post, I wanted to share what I discovered and demonstrate it with a few examples including unprotecting a worksheet, writing formulas, and creating a chart. Microsoft’s Copilot…

Max Date for per Category

By Jeff Lenning | October 15, 2024 |

Hello, and welcome to our latest Excel tutorial! I was recently asked the following question: how do I see the max date for each vendor assuming each vendor has multiple dates? So, in this post, we’ll learn how to find the maximum date for each category — in this case, each vendor with multiple transactions.…

Count Occurrences between Dates

By Jeff Lenning | October 8, 2024 |

Hello, Excel enthusiasts! Welcome back! Today, we’re diving into an interesting question I received recently: “How do I count occurrences between two dates in Excel?” As with most things in Excel, there are multiple ways to accomplish this task. In this post, I’ll focus on how to achieve our goal with a PivotTable. If you’re…