This year has been busiest year since inception of Chandoo.org. Wow, that is 10 years in a row of breaking previous records.
We had 101 posts, 7,400+ comments this year. Since our forum went thru a migration, I could not gather exact stats for forum. We have trained more than 2,500 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & Power Pivot classes.
More than 7.5 million people visited our site in last 1 year (up 14%) and consumed a whopping 20 million pages (up 16%). Each of these visitors spent an average of 2 minutes 21 seconds on our site becoming awesome in Excel. There are 1.8 million people who spent at least 15 minutes on our site.
We have added more than 25,000 members to our newsletter / RSS reader community, crossing 80,000 mark. It is a busy year.

Top 10 posts written in 2013
Top 10 formulas for analysts [Visitors: 65,638]
Employee vacation tracker [Visitors: 42,659]
Interactive chart in Excel – How to make it? [Visitors: 42,416]
Angry Formulas game… [Visitors: 36,392]
Learn top 10 Excel features [Visitors: 25,723]
To-do list with priorities – Excel templates [Visitors: 19,947]
Introduction to Power Pivot [Visitors: 21,298]
Best new features in Excel 2013 [Visitors: 21,539]
How to create interactive calendar in Excel? [Visitors: 17,478]
5 Keyboard shortcuts for writing better formulas [Visitors: 18,577]
Honorable mentions
How to create a then vs. now interactive chart? [Visitors: 16,711]
Shaded line charts in Excel [Visitors: 17,397]
INDEX formula usage, tips and tricks [Visitors: 16,280]
Rules for making awesome column charts [Visitors: 11,863]
Top 10 pages in Chandoo.org – 2013
As you can guess, a lot of people visit articles and pages that are not necessarily published in 2013. Here is a lit of most visited pages in our site in 2013.
Chandoo.org home page [Visitors: 559,208]
Excel Dashboards – Information, examples & tutorials [Visitors: 386,066]
Excel Pivot Tables Tutorial [Visitors: 487,794]
Project Management using Excel – Information, examples & tutorials [Visitors: 243,186]
Free Excel Templates for download [Visitors: 266,153]
Advanced Excel Skills [Visitors: 179,702]
VBA & Excel Macro Examples [Visitors: 132,938]
Excel Formulas home page [Visitors: 109,743]
Delete Blank Rows in Excel [Visitors: 198,543]
Excel Formulas Are Not Working [Visitors: 200,254]
Honorable mentions
Excel School online training program [Visitors: 163,952]
Between Formula Excel [Visitors: 181,539]
Chandoo.org forum [Visitors: 83,264]
Excel Sumproduct Formula [Visitors: 158,830]
Key trends this year
This year our main themes were,
- Making more people awesome in Excel, Dashboards, Power Pivot & VBA
- Teaching new ways of writing formulas to thru Formula Forensics & Formula Challenges series
- Meeting more of our readers face to face thru live classes in USA & Malaysia.
- Engaging our Facebook fans thru exclusive content
- Having lots of fun, playfulness and curiosity all the while.
Which posts did you enjoy most this year?
I hope you had a busy and fruitful year. Go ahead and tell us which posts, tips & articles you enjoyed most in 2013 using comments. And oh yea, wishing you a happy new year!












12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.