Excel University Blog

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Conditional Formatting

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…

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Dynamic Pivot-style Report with GROUPBY

By Jeff Lenning | January 9, 2024 |

In this tutorial, we will learn how to use the GROUPBY function to create dynamic pivot-style reports with a single formula. Let’s back up a sec. For years, we’ve turned to PivotTables to build summary reports. Now we have another option: the GROUPBY function. While it doesn’t create a true PivotTable, it does create a…

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How to Find Invalid Characters

By Jeff Lenning | January 2, 2024 |

Welcome to this tutorial on how to find invalid characters in Microsoft Excel. In this tutorial, we will explore different methods including formulas and conditional formatting to detect and highlight characters you define as “invalid” in your Excel worksheets. Since you can easily customize the list of “invalid” characters, this approach is extremely flexible and…

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Checkboxes

By Jeff Lenning | December 26, 2023 |

The goal of this tutorial is to learn how to insert checkboxes in Microsoft Excel using two different methods: checkbox cell controls and legacy form controls. We will also explore how to use checkboxes in formulas, conditional formatting, and how to activate the developer tab for legacy form controls. Video Step-by-step Exercise 1: Inserting Checkboxes…

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Count and Sum Negative Numbers

By Jeff Lenning | November 28, 2023 |

Welcome to our tutorial on how to count and sum negative numbers in Excel! We will cover three exercises where we will learn how to utilize COUNTIF, SUMIF, and conditional formatting to count, sum, and identify negative transactions. By the end, you will have multiple techniques to operate on negative numbers in Excel. Let’s jump…

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Find Cells That Contain Specific Text

By Jeff Lenning | November 14, 2023 |

The objective of this tutorial is to learn how to write formulas in Excel that can identify specific text strings within cells. We will start by using the SEARCH function to find cells that contain a specific word, then convert the results into TRUE / FALSE values, and finally apply conditional formatting to highlight these…

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Identify the Smallest Values in an Excel List

By Jeff Lenning | October 31, 2023 |

The goal of this tutorial is to provide step-by-step instructions on how to use various methods to extract or identify the smallest values in a list. We will cover three exercises that include the SMALL function, the SEQUENCE function, and conditional formatting. Video Walkthrough Let’s take each of these methods one at a time. We’ll…

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Excel How To Compare Two Columns (3 ways)

By Jeff Lenning | July 18, 2023 |

Using Microsoft Excel to compare two columns is a great way to look for discrepancies or similarities between two different sets of data. This post provides 3 different ways to accomplish this so that you can use the one that is most appropriate for your data and workbook. Video Step-by-step guide Let’s work through each…

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Excel How To Remove Duplicates (3 Easy Ways)

By Jeff Lenning | May 30, 2023 |

This post demonstrates how to remove duplicates from your Microsoft Excel worksheets. As with just about anything in Excel, there are multiple ways. I’ll show you 3 of the easiest and fastest ways to do it, specifically: the Remove Duplicates command, the UNIQUE function, and Power Query. Video Narrative We’ll just walk through each of…

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Woman happily looking at her laptop after learning how to hide rows in Excel based on cell value

Hide Rows in Excel Based on Cell Value (Without VBA)

By Excel University | February 28, 2023 |

Being able to hide rows based on cell value in Excel is a handy skill for anyone who needs to organize a large spreadsheet. Imagine you have a huge list of data, but only some of the rows are relevant to you at the moment. When you hide rows based on cell value, you can…

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