Excel University Blog
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INDEX
If you’ve used the VLOOKUP function before, you know that the lookup column is expected to be in the leftmost column within the range. Meaning, it’s going to look for a value in the leftmost column within the range and once it finds its match, it will shoot to the right to return the related…
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In this article, we’ll show how to easily create and update Excel reports from QuickBooks. But, let’s back up a second. When QuickBooks has the report you want, awesome! But, when it doesn’t, we often turn to Excel. This can happen when QuickBooks doesn’t have all of the data you need for the report, for…
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Looking to make work easier? Instead of trying to do it all, focus on learning these nine useful advanced Excel functions.
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In this video, which is part of Microsoft’s Modern Excel webcast series, we’ll cover the basic syntax of FILTER and then see how it compares to VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, XLOOKUP, and SUMIFS. The question is: can FILTER accomplish the tasks we typically associate with these powerful Excel functions? Note: not all versions of Excel contain the…
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Psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a line that is often referred to as Maslow’s Hammer. It goes something like this: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” I’ve heard the simplified version more often: “If all you have is a…
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There are numerous lookup functions in Excel, and often, their capabilities overlap. And, that is true with many things in Excel…there are often multiple ways to accomplish any given task. Performing lookups is no exception. So, how are we supposed to know which lookup function to use? Often, Excel users try to decide between VLOOKUP…
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I recently received a question about how to find the most recent transaction date of a list of items. There are a few fun ways to accomplish this, and so I thought I’d walk through three options. Thanks Darrell for your question! Objective The exact question from Darrell is: “I have a data table of…
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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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If you have a data table that is updated frequently, for example, a new column is added each month, you may want to find the sum of the last three columns. But, you don’t want to rewrite your formula each time you add a new column. Fortunately, you can accomplish this task with two lookup functions,…
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The table feature introduced in Excel 2007 is amazing and has nearly eliminated the need to build dynamic named ranges since tables auto-expand. Beyond auto-expansion, tables offer numerous other benefits, including, structured references which allow us to refer to an area within the table, such as a specific column. In this post, we’ll examine a method…
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