Excel University Blog

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How to Launder Money with Excel (Benford’s Law)

By Jeff Lenning | April 9, 2024 |

Hello and welcome to another informative blog post from Excel University. Today, we’re diving into a somewhat unusual topic – using Excel to launder money. If you aren’t familiar with that term, it simply means taking cash received from an illegal enterprise and running it through a legitimate business. That way, the money appears as…

Combine Sheets From Workbooks as Separate Tabs (Not merged)

By Jeff Lenning | April 2, 2024 |

In today’s post, we’ll be diving into an exciting topic that springs up occasionally among Excel users: “How can you combine worksheets from different workbooks while keeping all the sheets separate in the resulting combined workbook?” Sounds tricky, doesn’t it? But don’t worry! We’ll be navigating through this method together. We’ll go step by step…

Create Hyperlinks to Files in a Folder

By Jeff Lenning | March 26, 2024 |

Today, we’re diving into an exciting way to enhance your data organization skills using Excel. I was recently asked the following question: Is there a way to create a list of files so that the files in the list could be hyperlinked back to the source in the folder? I’m going to answer that question…

Conditional Formatting With Data Validation

By Jeff Lenning | March 12, 2024 |

In today’s Excel University blog post, we’re going to explore the incredible combination of the Conditional Formatting and Data Validation features in Excel. I was recently asked the following question: How do I highlight matching customers on one worksheet based on the customer selected in a data validation drop-down list on another? And I’ll answer…

Excel How to Conditionally Format Variances

By Jeff Lenning | March 5, 2024 |

Today, we’re diving into conditional formatting rules. Why? Well, to answer a question I received recently, which is basically: “I want a cell to be conditionally formatted based on the value in another cell where the criteria is: if cell C7 is up to 10% less than D7 then have a yellow color and if…

Highlight Values Found Multiple Times

By Jeff Lenning | February 27, 2024 |

Today, we’ll highlight recurring values within a dataset in order to answer a recent question. I was asked the following “I’m trying to get it to recognize if a specific letter, like X, is in a column at least three times. What could the formula look like?” And I’ll answer that question in this post.…

Merge Excel Files with Multiple Sheets

By Jeff Lenning | February 20, 2024 |

Today, we’re answering a question we received about how to combine multiple Excel workbooks into a single workbook, even when there are a variable number of worksheets within each workbook. This post shows how to use Power Query to accomplish it. Let’s jump right in! Video Classic Problem, User-friendly Solution In handling large datasets or…

Highlight Correct Answer with Conditional Formatting

By Jeff Lenning | February 6, 2024 |

Time to walk through another exciting Excel adventure 🙂 Today, we’re zooming in on an interesting question I recently received: “How can I highlight correct answers on an Excel worksheet for my granddaughter’s multiplication tables?” Sounds like a marvelously practical application of Excel, doesn’t it? Well, let’s dive in and find out how we can…

Create a Dynamic Month List for Reports or KPIs

By Jeff Lenning | January 30, 2024 |

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a dynamic list of months in Excel using various functions including TAKE, EOMONTH, and SEQUENCE. This list can be used for reporting or pulling key performance indicators (KPIs) with lookup functions such as XLOOKUP. If you create the same basic report each month, and would like…

PIVOTBY A Dynamic PivotTable Alternative

By Jeff Lenning | January 16, 2024 |

Excel’s PIVOTBY function allows you to create dynamic summary reports that look very much like PivotTables. However, they are totally dynamic … no need to click Refresh. They are created with a single formula, but do not have the rich features and capabilities of PivotTables. Depending on your workbook, the PIVOTBY function may be a…