All articles with 'Excel 101' Tag

Learn how to calculate weighted averages in excel using formulas. In this article we will learn what a weighted average is and how to Excel’s SUMPRODUCT formula to calculate weighted average / weighted mean.

What is weighted average?

Wikipedia defines weighted average as, “The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean …, where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others.”

Calculating weighted averages in excel is not straight forward as there is no built-in formula. But we can use SUMPRODUCT formula to easily calculate them. Read on to find out how.

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 35 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

It is Olympic season. Everyone I know is tracking the games and checking their country’s performance. One thing that we notice when looking at medal tally is,

A single Gold medal is worth more than any number of Silver medals. Like wise, a single Silver medal is worth more than any number of Bronze medals.

So, when you look at the ranking of countries, you see countries with single Gold medal higher up than countries with lots of Silver and Bronze medals (but no Gold).

Excel date time features are very handy and knowing how to use Excel date values can help you save a ton of time in your day to day spreadsheet chores. Let us prepare for your date with the sheet using these 10 handy tips.

Before jumping on to the tips, it helps to know how excel represents the date and time.

Microsoft Excel stores dates as sequential numbers … January 1, 1900 is serial number 1, and 28 July, 2021 is serial number 44405 because it is 44,405 days after January 1, 1900. Excel stores times as decimal fractions because time is considered a portion of a day.

Read on to learn more.

Excel text functions are essential for cleaning up data, extracting parts or combining results. Learn the most important functions and their usage in this article.

Congratulations to you if your job does not involve dead lines. For the rest of us, deadlines are the sole motivation for working (barring free internet & the coffee machine in 2nd floor, of course). So today, lets talk about a very familiar problem.

How to highlight due dates in Excel?

The item can be an invoice, a to do activity, a project or anything. So how would you do it using Excel?

Back when I was working as a project lead, everyday my project manager would ask me the same question.

“Chandoo, whats the progress?”

He was so punctual about it, even on days when our coffee machine wasn’t working.

As you can see, tracking progress is an obsession we all have. At this very moment, if you pay close attention, you can hear mouse clicks of thousands of analysts and managers all over the world making project progress charts.

So today, lets talk about best charts to show % progress against a goal.

We can take any Excel workbook and format it until Christmas, and we would still not be done. But not many of us have so much of time or energy. So, today, lets talk formatting.

In this, you will learn how to
1) Use tables to format data quickly
2) Change colors of your worksheet in a snap
3) Use cell styles
4) Quickly clone formatting using format painter
5) Clear formats to begin with a clean-slate
6) Formatting shortcuts
7) Formatting options for print
and 8 ) Why you should not go overboard formatting and 10 other tips.

So go ahead and become a formatting pro.

This is part of our Excel Interview Questions series.

VLOOKUP or INDEX+MATCH? When you should use each function and why?

This is such a great question to ask in interviews. So in my first installment of Excel interview questions, let me answer it.

Obviously, everywhere you look this week, you find advice on how to do better this year.

Well, you don’t have to wait for a new year to become awesome at your work, any day is new year for the rest of your life.

So, today I want to share 12 steps to learn Excel and becoming awesome. But first I have a secret to confess…,

I think becoming awesome in Excel useless.

What we really want is, to become awesome in our work. Since we spend a lot of time using Excel (and other office software), knowing how to use these better can have a huge impact on how we do our work.

In that spirit, lets look at 12 steps to learn Excel so you become awesome in your work.

The first step of getting awesome in Excel is to understand that you can ask Excel do things for you. This is done by speaking a special language called as “Excel Formulas”. When you write a formula or function, you are asking Excel to figure out something from the values you have. Say you want to add up a bunch of values in a range A1:A10, you can ask Excel to do this for you by writing =SUM(A1:A10) and bingo, you get the result immediately. The best part is, if your numbers change, the answer changes too.

If you are a beginner, the world of Excel formulas can feel overwhelming. Why not? There are hundreds of different formulas in Excel.  So which formulas should you learn?

This guide gives you the answer. Here are 100+ most common Excel formula examples for every occasion. Each box describes a problem statement, an example, result, some notes and link to learn more. Use this guide to learn formulas quickly.

Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.

What is an excel table?

Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”

Excel SUMIFS function is used to calculate the sum of values that meet any criteria. For example, you can calculate the total sales in east zone for product Pod Gun using SUMIFS formula.
In this article, you will learn:

• What is SUMIFS function and how to use it?
• Syntax for SUMIFS
• Using SUMIFS() with tables and structural references
• SUMIFS examples – simple, wild card
• Using SUMIFS() with date & time values
• Free sample file for SUMIFS formula
• More formulas for data analysis

We all know that learning a few keyboard shortcuts can speedup your Excel game. Most pro users rely on a handful shortcuts when working with large spreadsheets. But when it comes to charting, we automatically reach for mouse. But do you know that you can use few simple shortcuts to do most day to day chart related things?

Ready for top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel charts? Read on.

Pivot tables are fun, easy and super useful. Except, they can be ugly when it comes to presentation. Here is a quick way to make a pivot look more like a report.

• Just type over the headers / total fields to make them user friendly.

See this quick demo to understand what I mean:

So simple and effective.