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What are the formulas you wish Excel had ?

  • Last updated on January 22, 2009
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Here is a list of formulas I wish MS Excel had. Alas, we need to build some work-arounds to solve them though.

  • CONCATENATE (range): that can take a range of cells and churn out a big text combining all of them. Of course, here a VBA UDF alternative to concatenate range of cells.
  • SPLIT (text, delimiter, part): that can take a text and split it based on the specified delimiter. We will have to use a formula based alternative to split text
  • UNIQUE(list, number): that takes a list and returns the unique items based on the number specified. Well, for the time being we can get unique items with formulas.
  • ISBETWEEN(number, first, second): to check whether “number” is between “first” and “second”. You can do this using AND() formula like AND(number>=first, number<=second).
  • FINDLAST(findthis, text): that can find the last occurrence of a particular text in another text. I don’t know any good formula for this.

What are the formulas you wish Excel had ?

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6 Responses to “Using Lookup Formulas with Excel Tables [Video]”

  1. Damian says:
    November 9, 2010 at 8:20 am

    H1 !
    this is my very first comment.
    Can you use same technique with Excel 2003 lists ?
    thanks 😀

    Reply
  2. Tom says:
    November 9, 2010 at 6:58 pm

    Thanks, Chandoo! I like seeing the sneak peak of what's to come on Friday too 🙂

    Reply
  3. Chandoo says:
    November 11, 2010 at 8:09 am

    @Damian.. Welcome to chandoo.org. Thanks for the comments.

    Yes, you can use the same with Excel 2003 lists too.

    @Tom.. You have seen future and its awesome.. isnt it?

    Reply
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  6. Q.fg says:
    May 4, 2015 at 8:36 pm

    Hi, is there a vlookup formula for the second example (IDlist)? I used a similar formula to look up the ID for the person, but the reverse way (look up the person with the ID) comes up N/A.

    Reply

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