Excel University Blog
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Functions
My name is Penny Li, a cross-border tax accountant, and I often come across instances in my work where I need to convert foreign currencies to US dollar. I have decided to build a foreign currency conversion tool in Excel that is capable of generating single-day as well as average foreign exchange rates for multiple…
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Overview During an Excel University webinar, Jeff gave a demonstration of Power Query that related to a company’s annual budget process. Initially, I was not familiar with Power Query but decided to learn it. Ultimately, I was able to incorporate Power Query into our annual budget process, eliminating the need for the software we were…
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In this post, we’ll create a list of months with a single Excel formula. To make it more interesting, we’ll allow the user to enter the desired number of months to display and create additional formulas to show the last day of each month, the number of days in the each month, the month number,…
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In this post, we’ll see how to create an Excel calendar with a single formula. Specifically, we will write a formula that displays the days of any month in a graphical calendar format. Our graphical calendar displays the days of the specified month in 7 columns (Sunday through Saturday) and includes a row for each…
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This is the third and final post in the PivotTable Text Values Alternative series, where we are discussing alternatives to displaying text values in PivotTables. In the first post, we used Power Query as an alternative. In the second post, we combined multiple text values. In this post, we’ll use the FILTER function as an…
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A mapping table is a handy way to automatically translate labels between systems and reports. As with just about anything in Excel, there are many ways to implement a mapping table. For example, we could create a helper column to store the amounts with the SUMIFS function as I discussed in this Journal of Accountancy…
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Often, our Excel formulas are simple and short. As such, they are easy to read, understand and maintain over time. But, as the complexity of our workbooks increases, so can the complexity of our formulas. Sometimes, we end up with unwieldy formulas that are long and difficult to understand and maintain. One cause for such…
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Excel has a lot of useful functions: FILTER, SUMIFS, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, SUM, SUBTOTAL and more. All in, Excel has about 500 functions, so it’s likely there’s one that returns the result you need. But now and again you may find yourself where there isn’t a built-in function that returns the value you are trying to…
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This is the second post in the Slow to Fast series, where we are taking incremental steps to improving our reconciliations. In the first post we improved a purely manual process with conditional formatting. That approach works when the lists are relatively small, on the same sheet, and when we are only concerned with a…
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The family of IFS functions, such as SUMIFS and COUNTIFS, use AND logic when evaluating multiple conditions. In other words, all conditions must be true to be included. And generally, this logic works well. However, there are situations when we’d like to use OR logic instead. That is, any of the conditions can be true…
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