Excel University Blog
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Techniques
My Excel-friend John Michaloudis does an annual interview of Excel experts from all over the world. The format of his interview is an audio podcast. This year, you can hear directly from 20 Excel experts as they share their best Excel tips and ideas. The tips include shortcuts, functions, and features, and it is a…
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If you like shortcuts, features, and tools that can save you time in Excel, I’d like to call your attention to a Journal of Accountancy article that includes tips from several Excel experts. I’m honored that my tips were included in the article š The article includes these main categories of tips: Keyboard shortcuts Quick…
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In this post, we’ll use a Get & Transform query to help with our reconciliation. The idea for this post came from a question from Laura (thanks Laura!) The basic idea is that we have two worksheets. One contains the invoice totals and the other contains line item details, where there are many line items per…
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In recent back-to-back webinars, two different attendees asked how to checkĀ to see if a user entered a text string with all caps. Specifically, they asked how to set up a data validation rule to determineĀ if all lettersĀ are capitalized.Ā So, I figured I would write a quick post about the technique. Objective Let’s just take a moment…
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In this post, weāll create a drop-down that contains a unique list of choices derived from a column that contains duplicate values. This may sound familiar as we previously accomplished this with a PivotTable. However, the Power Query feature that’s built-in to Excel 2016 makes this process easier. Objective We have a data table that contains RepID,…
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When you need to perform a lookup, your instinct tells you to use VLOOKUP. But, when your lookup uses multiple conditions and columns, you may be inclined to use SUMIFS. However, when the value you need to return is a text string, rather than a numeric value, you are precluded from using SUMIFS since it only…
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The terms Moving, Rolling, and Trailing are commonly used to describe the same calculation idea…that we want to operate on the previous say 3, 6, or 12 data rows. In this post, we’ll allow the user to define the number of rows to include and use the OFFSET function to dynamically define the desired range. Objective…
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Beginning with Excel 2013 for Windows, we can use Slicers to filter table data. In this post, we’ll explore how to use Slicers as a relatively easy alternative to conditional drop-downs. Objective When we want to allow a user to select a choice from a list of items, we often consider using the Data Validation feature to…
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In this post, we’ll examine a couple of ideas for computing income tax in Excel using tax tables. Specifically, we’ll use VLOOKUP with a helper column, we’ll remove the helper column with SUMPRODUCT, and then we’ll use data validation and the INDIRECT function to make it easy to pick the desired tax table, such as single or married…
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In this post, we’ll recreate a heat map presented in Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design, 2nd Edition, using an Excel PivotTable and a bit of conditional formatting. Objective Before we get too far, let’s take a look at our objective. We are trying to create a heat map that uses variation in color intensity to…
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