Excel University Blog

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Format

Creating a 4-4-5 Financial Calendar

By Jeff Lenning | April 16, 2024 |

We all love Excel, don’t we? But it’s just not that simple when it comes to creating a 4-4-5 Financial Calendar! Got questions about how it’s done? You’re not alone! Today, we will walk you through the creation of a 4-4-5 (4 weeks, 4 weeks, and 5 weeks) calendar in Excel. By the end of…

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Excel Tips from 20 Experts

By Jeff Lenning | February 21, 2023 |

My friend John Michaloudis does an annual survey of Excel MVPs and experts and asks for their best Excel tip. He compiles the tips into an audio podcast along with show notes and related links. This is a great resource and I love sharing it every year. This year, he rounded up tips from: You’ll…

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Excel Dates and Times Article

By Jeff Lenning | January 5, 2017 |

Have you ever tried to do some type of calculation with a time value in Excel, only to receive a strange result? Two examples are adding up hours on a time sheet and multiplying the number of hours worked by a pay rate. If you’ve tried something like this and encountered an unexpected result, the…

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Number Format Macro

By Jeff Lenning | March 17, 2016 |

Excel users often spend a bunch of time applying the same format to number cells. Some numbers are stored values and others are calculated with formulas. The task of manually applying the same format to all of the numbers in the worksheet, especially when the numbers aren’t in a continuous range, can feel quite repetitive.…

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Accounting Number Formats QAT

By Jeff Lenning | January 20, 2016 |

Excel has cell formatting designed just for accountants. Not surprisingly, it is called the Accounting Number Format. The built-in ribbon commands apply the format with two decimals and the currency symbol. This post demonstrates how to set up two handy QAT icons so that we can quickly apply this format with no decimals and without a currency…

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Display a Negative Number as Positive

By Jeff Lenning | June 12, 2015 |

With a simple custom format code, we can display negative numbers as positive…but…why would we want to? So that we can simplify our formulas and make our workbooks more reliable of course. Let’s check it out. Objective Before we get to the mechanics, let’s confirm our goal. We have a worksheet, in this case a little…

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Custom Date Formats

By Jeff Lenning | February 26, 2015 |

In this post, we’ll examine custom format codes that allow you to get your date values formatted exactly as desired. This post is inspired by Sidney, who asked how to change date formats in Excel. Format Cells To change the format of a date value, select the cell and then open the Format Cells dialog…

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