Excel University Blog

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INDEX

Currency Exchange Rates

By Jeff Lenning | December 2, 2025 |

Manually searching for currency exchange rates is a thing of the past. With Excel’s smart integrations, we can now pull real-time foreign exchange data into our workbooks using built-in features and free web APIs. Whether we are looking up current rates or building a currency converter, Excel has all the tools we need to get…

Last Date in Column

By Jeff Lenning | July 23, 2024 |

Hello and welcome to our latest tutorial! Today we’re diving into a common Excel challenge: finding the last date in a column. This is especially useful if you add rows to your data regularly. Let’s explore three different exercises to solve this problem. Video Tutorial Exercise 1: Using the TAKE Function in a Table Step-by-Step…

Get Last Data Row from PivotTable

By Jeff Lenning | June 4, 2024 |

The post was written to answer a question I recently received: How can we retrieve the last row from a PivotTable? Buckle up as we solve this challenge by nesting two Excel functions into a single formula. Video Step-by-step Let’s visualize the essenence of the question. We have a PivotTable in our worksheet, perhaps something…

Excel How To VLOOKUP Left (3 ways)

By Jeff Lenning | April 4, 2023 |

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…

Easily Create and Update Excel Reports from QuickBooks

By Trevor Lee | March 22, 2022 |

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…

These Are the Top 9 Most Useful Advanced Excel Functions

By Excel University | March 15, 2022 |

Looking to make work easier? Instead of trying to do it all, focus on learning these nine useful advanced Excel functions.

FILTER vs VLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, XLOOKUP, SUMIFS

By Jeff Lenning | October 8, 2020 |

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…

VLOOKUP Hack #10: Maslow’s Hammer

By Jeff Lenning | January 10, 2018 |

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…

VLOOKUP vs INDEX-MATCH

By Jeff Lenning | May 25, 2017 |

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…

Most Recent Transaction Date

By Jeff Lenning | March 9, 2017 |

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…