Excel University Blog

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Get & Transform

How To Group Rows (comma list of values)

By Jeff Lenning | May 7, 2024 |

Hello and welcome to our post on grouping rows in Excel. We will walk through the process of combining the values in multiple rows into a single cell (comma-separated list of values). The example we’ll use to demonstrate the steps is to combine multiple email addresses for each contact into a single cell. But, this…

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Create Calculated Columns without Writing Formulas

By Jeff Lenning | September 14, 2020 |

Historically, we have created calculated columns by writing formulas. In this post, we’ll see that in some cases, clicking a few buttons in Power Query can be a nice alternative. Objective Before we get into the mechanics, let’s confirm our objective. Let’s say we have a table full of transactions, like this: We would like…

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List of Worksheets in a Drop Down

By Jeff Lenning | May 27, 2020 |

In this post, I’ll answer a question I received from Sara about how to create a drop down with each worksheet name and reference it in a formula to retrieve values from the selected sheet. As this is Excel, there are a variety of alternatives to accomplish this. In this post, I’ll demonstrate one such…

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Retrieve First Occurrence After a Date

By Jeff Lenning | January 1, 2020 |

In this post, we’ll discuss one approach for retrieving the first occurrence (or min date) after a specified date. Let me back up. Michael asked for a way to find the first occurrence of an office visit (a date) after the date of being discharged from the hospital (and within 30 days). As this is…

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VLOOKUP Return Multiple Matching Rows and Columns

By Jeff Lenning | November 13, 2019 |

In this post, we’ll discuss a way to simulate using VLOOKUP to return multiple matching rows and/or columns. What do you mean by “simulate” Jeff? Well, VLOOKUP is designed to return a single value, not multiple values. That is, VLOOKUP scans down the lookup range and stops at the first matching row … ignoring any…

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Stock Quotes CalCPA Article

By Jeff Lenning | July 15, 2019 |

Microsoft recently updated the built-in tools for retrieving stock quotes into Excel. If you’re typing closing prices into Excel manually, my recent California CPA Magazine article may be able to help you get it done faster. Specifically, it talks about how the Stock data type retrieves current quotes and related information, and how Power Query…

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Power Query Calendar

By Jeff Lenning | February 6, 2019 |

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post on how to create a graphical calendar using a PivotTable. I received a few questions about how to insert event names into the calendar. Generally, PivotTable value fields support numeric values (such as day 1, 2, 3), and not text values (such as Filing Deadline or…

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Sum Every Nth Row in a Column

By Jeff Lenning | December 19, 2018 |

Let’s say you have a single-column list of transactions. You want to add up the amount values, which are on every say 5th row. This is a perfect task for Power Query. So, in this post, I’ll demonstrate how to set up a query that removes and keeps a defined number of rows in a…

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Identify Missing IDs and Sequence Gaps

By Jeff Lenning | December 10, 2018 |

There are several ways in Excel to find missing IDs (or gaps) in a big list of sequential IDs, such as check numbers or invoice numbers. In this post, we’ll use Power Query so that each time we have a new list, we simply click Refresh. Excel then creates an updated list of the missing…

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Query Variables

By Jeff Lenning | September 27, 2018 |

Let’s say we are building a query to clean up and prepare some data for use, and we have a specific value we need to use within the query. But, we would like to be able to change the value as desired, before refreshing the query. One option would be to enter and update that…

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