Excel University Blog

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Functions

RATE: Find Your Interest Rate

By Jeff Lenning | April 29, 2025 |

Understanding how to calculate interest rates is crucial for financial planning. Whether you’re determining the interest rate for a loan or projecting your investment growth, Excel’s RATE function is a powerful tool. In this post, we’ll explore how to use the RATE function to unlock hidden financial insights, covering loans, balloon payments, and investment goals.…

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NPER: Time Your Payoff

By Jeff Lenning | April 22, 2025 |

Managing finances effectively often requires understanding how long it will take to pay off a loan or reach a savings goal. Excel’s NPER function helps us determine the number of periods needed based on interest rate, payments, and loan amounts. Whether we’re looking at loans, mortgages, or investments, this function is crucial for financial planning.…

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How to Become a Millionaire with this Simple Formula (PMT)

By Jeff Lenning | April 15, 2025 |

Ever wondered how much you need to save each month to reach a financial goal, like becoming a millionaire? The PMT function in Excel can help you calculate that with just a few simple inputs. While the PMT function is traditionally used to calculate loan payments, we can also use it to determine how much…

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Dynamic Scroll Range

By Jeff Lenning | March 11, 2025 |

A spin button in Excel is a great way to create an interactive and dynamic scrolling range for reports, dashboards, or data analysis. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to insert a spin button, link it to a cell, and use it to scroll through data by days, weeks, months, quarters, and years. Let’s…

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Excel vs ChatGPT

By Jeff Lenning | February 25, 2025 |

When working with messy data, we often turn to Excel, but with the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT, we now have new ways to tackle these challenges. In this post, we’ll compare Excel and ChatGPT side by side, using three common data tasks: We’ll see how each tool handles the job, the pros and…

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Fixed Monthly Value Between Dates

By Jeff Lenning | January 21, 2025 |

Today, we’re tackling an interesting challenge: How to add a fixed value to the first day of each month between a start and end date. We’ll explore three approaches, ranging from detailed to concise, so you can choose the one that best suits your needs. Video Step-by-step Tutorial The task is straightforward: We’ll walk through…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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