
Watching the Olympic athletes run & jump all I could think of is,
- What should I eat to jump & sprint like that?
- How come I never heard about steeple chase?
- Should we really have 3 bullet points in all lists?
But I digress. Coming back, when watching one of those hurdles events, I got an idea as sharp as Chinese table tennis team.
Why not create a hurdles game in Excel to measure how good you are with keyboard?
So ladies & gentleman, let me present you our very own Olympics hurdle run.
Excel Hurdles Challenge
What is it?
This is a simple spreadsheet based game. Your objective is to reach from Start cell to End cell in shortest possible time, ONLY USING KEYBOARD.
Hurdles challenge eh?!? What rules I must obey?
- The first rule of hurdles challenge is you use ONLY KEYBOARD.
- You must touch cells on the red trail only.
- You are not allowed to land on blank cells unless.
- For each violation of above 3 rules, you get 1 second penalty.
- That is all. Happy jumping & sprinting.
Download Excel Hurdles Challenge
Click here to download the challenge workbook.
Just enable macros and get jumping.
Note: this workbook is tested in Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013 and works ok.
How fast did you go?
When I tried it first time, I got 23 seconds. But after a bit of practice, I got to 17 seconds and no penalties. While I am no Usain Bolt, I feel pretty happy with result.
What about you? How fast can you go? Go ahead and take the hurdles challenge and post your time in comments.
Once you reach your personal best, go enjoy the weekend. When we meet next week, I will have something awesome, something new and something smart waiting for you.
Struggling with the hurdles? You should learn a few keyboard shortcuts.
Check out below pages to pick up some keyboard shortcuts. Once done, go back and take the challenge.
- Comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts
- 10 Keyboard shortcuts I can’t live without
- 100 Excel tips, tricks & shortcuts
PS: If you have more time to kill, check out these Excel games.














3 Responses to “Filter one table if the value is in another table (Formula Trick)”
What about the opposite? I want a list of products without sales or customers with no orders. So I would exclude the ones that are on the other table.
Good question. You can check for the =0 as countifs result. for example,
=FILTER(orders, COUNTIFS(products, orders[Product])=0)
should work in this case.
PS: I have added this example to the article now.
Hi there!
Could i check if there was a way to return certain fields of the table only?
so based off your example above, i would like to continue to use the 'Products" table as a way to filter out items from my "Orders" table, but only want to show maybe only the "Product" and "Order Value" fields, rather than all 5 fields (sales person, customer, product, date, order value).