Excel University Blog

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UNIQUE

The TEXTJOIN Function

By Jeff Lenning | February 3, 2026 |

Combining text data from different cells is a common task in Excel, especially when dealing with employee directories, codes, or summarized reports. While we’ve often relied on functions like CONCATENATE or the ampersand (&) to accomplish this, Excel’s TEXTJOIN function provides a more flexible, powerful, and streamlined approach. Video What is the TEXTJOIN Function? In…

Rows of Dependent Drop Downs

By Jeff Lenning | January 14, 2025 |

When working with drop down lists in Excel, creating dependent drop downs that dynamically adapt based on a primary choice is both powerful and time-saving. This post walks through setting up rows of dependent drop downs and concludes with a method to notify users when a secondary choice becomes invalid. Let’s dive in! Video Step-by-step…

Formula to Remove Duplicates

By Jeff Lenning | December 10, 2024 |

Removing duplicates in Excel is a common task, but what if you want more control than the Remove Duplicates command provides? Maybe you need a formula to handle duplicates dynamically. In this guide, we’ll cover how to remove duplicates from a single column, handle multiple columns, and use formulas for various scenarios like summing, finding…

Max Date for per Category

By Jeff Lenning | October 15, 2024 |

Hello, and welcome to our latest Excel tutorial! I was recently asked the following question: how do I see the max date for each vendor assuming each vendor has multiple dates? So, in this post, we’ll learn how to find the maximum date for each category — in this case, each vendor with multiple transactions.…

Any value in A also in B

By Jeff Lenning | August 20, 2024 |

I recently received a question: “I have two columns of numbers and want one cell at the top to tell me if any values in column A exist in column B.” In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to accomplish this using some essential Excel functions. Video Objective The question asked how to write…

Highlight Values Found Multiple Times

By Jeff Lenning | February 27, 2024 |

Today, we’ll highlight recurring values within a dataset in order to answer a recent question. I was asked the following “I’m trying to get it to recognize if a specific letter, like X, is in a column at least three times. What could the formula look like?” And I’ll answer that question in this post.…

What is a dynamic array formula in Excel

By Jeff Lenning | October 10, 2023 |

In this tutorial, we will learn about dynamic array formulas in Excel, which allow us to write a single formula that returns multiple results and spills them into adjacent cells. We will cover various exercises, exploring array creation, dynamic array functions, and combining functions for powerful data manipulation. By the end, you’ll have a solid…

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…

Create a Dynamic PivotTable Style Report with One Formula

By Jeff Lenning | March 29, 2022 |

Historically, we’ve had two basic ways to create reports in Excel. We could enter the report labels and use formulas to compute the report values or we could use a PivotTable. Both options had pros and cons. We’d have to pick the report type based on the context of our workbook. In this post, I’ll…

PivotTable Text Values Alternative with FILTER

By Jeff Lenning | October 12, 2021 |

This is the third and final post in the PivotTable Text Values Alternative series, where we are discussing alternatives to displaying text values in PivotTables. In the first post, we used Power Query as an alternative. In the second post, we combined multiple text values. In this post, we’ll use the FILTER function as an…