VLOOKUP is one of the most popular Excel functions. It can do amazing things and help save time. But, there are some really cool hacks that make it even better. This is the first post in a series of VLOOKUP Hacks. Hope you enjoy 🙂 Issue VLOOKUP Hack #1 helps address the sort issue. Sort […]
Often when we use Excel, we think of its ability to operate on numbers. But, Excel is also good at operating on other data types, such as dates and text strings. When we limit our use of formulas to numbers only, we miss out on many opportunities for efficiency. In this article, I’ll talk about […]
This post will demonstrate how to use Excel formulas to determine sample selections based on dollar units. The basic idea is that each dollar is a sampling unit, and as such, this method is more likely to select higher dollar items for testing. This method goes by several names, including monetary unit sampling, dollar unit […]
There are numerous lookup functions in Excel, and often, their capabilities overlap. And, that is true with many things in Excel…there are often multiple ways to accomplish any given task. Performing lookups is no exception. So, how are we supposed to know which lookup function to use? Often, Excel users try to decide between VLOOKUP […]
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 […]
I was recently working on a workbook, and had to convert an event time from one time zone to another. Basically, I wanted to enter the time of day into a cell, and then I needed a formula to compute the event time in a different time zone. This post walks through the formula to […]
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 […]
If you need to compute the total for certain cells based on their font or fill color, you may have noticed that Excel formulas operate on stored values, not displayed values. That means that functions such as SUM and SUMIFS operate on the underlying cell values and disregard cell formatting, such as font or fill […]
The SUBTOTAL is a wonderful alternative to the SUM function, and this post shows how to set up a shortcut button that inserts the SUBTOTAL function. Our new shortcut button will be similar to the AutoSum button that inserts the SUM function because it will automatically include the cells above. Objective Before we get started, let’s […]
If you have ever wished that the VLOOKUP function could return the sum of two or more related columns, this trick will get you there. Objective Before we get into the details, let’s be clear about our objective. We have some transactions that were exported from our accounting system as shown below. We would like […]