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All articles with 'OFFSET()' Tag

VLOOKUP(), MATCH() and INDEX() – explained in plain English

Published on Feb 11, 2024 in Featured, Learn Excel
VLOOKUP(), MATCH() and INDEX() – explained in plain English

VLOOKUP may not make you tall, rich and famous, but learning it can certainly give you wings. It makes you to connect two different tabular lists and saves a ton of time. In my opinion understanding VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH worksheet formulas can transform you from normal excel user to a data processing beast. Today, […]

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Speed up your Excel Formulas [10 Practical Tips]

Published on Apr 14, 2023 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
Speed up your Excel Formulas [10 Practical Tips]

Excel formulas acting slow? Today lets talk about optimizing & speeding up Excel formulas. Use these tips & ideas to super-charge your sluggish workbook. Use the best practices & formula guidelines described in this post to optimize your complex worksheet models & make them faster.

1. Use tables to hold the data
2. Use named ranges & named formulas
3. Use Dynamic Array formulas
4. Sort your data
5. Use manual calculation mode

… and more. Read on to learn these top 10 tips & ideas to improve performance of your excel formulas.

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Excel Basics: How to add drop down list to validate data

Published on Sep 27, 2019 in Learn Excel
Excel Basics: How to add drop down list to validate data

Validating your data as you type can prevent any surprises when you are doing analysis / follow-up on the data. Thankfully, excel has the right tools to do it. Excel drop down list can assist you in picking up a value from a valid list to enter in a cell. Here is a short how-to […]

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One Control Three Cells

Published on Mar 5, 2018 in Excel Howtos, Huis, Posts by Hui
One Control Three Cells

Learn a technique to control multiple cells with 1 Control.

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Relative References in Excel Tables

Published on Apr 21, 2017 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
Relative References in Excel Tables

Excel Tables have been around for a decade now (they are introduced in Excel 2007), and yet, very few people use them. They are versatile, easy and elegant. At Chandoo.org, we celebrate Tables all the time. If you have never used them, start with below tuts.

While tables are super helpful, they do come with some limitations. Today let’s examine one such unique problem and learn about an elegant solution.

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An odd lookup problem [Formulas]

Published on Dec 6, 2016 in Excel Challenges, Learn Excel
An odd lookup problem [Formulas]

Let’s say you have some employee data in employee name, manager name format. But the data is all in one column, with odd rows containing employee names & even rows containing manager names. Something like above.

And you want to find out who is the boss for a given employee. Say, “Andrea Nichols”.

Your regular MATCH() formula for Andrea over the data range returns wrong answer as it will find first occurrence of Andrea (which in this case happens to be on even row, hence a manager record).

So how would you write the lookup formula?

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CP055: “Yes, I am back” edition (and a bonus Excel tip)

Published on Oct 13, 2016 in Chandoo.org Podcast Sessions
CP055: “Yes, I am back” edition (and a bonus Excel tip)

Ladies & gentlemen, its time we revived the much loved Chandoo.org podcast. In the 55th episode, I do a lousy imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous “I will be back” and tell you why there was such a long gap between episodes, my plans for reviving our podcast and more.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

  • Why there was such a long gap between last and this episode
  • What next?
  • How to extract every 6th item from a list?
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Earth Venus cosmic dance – Animated chart in Excel

Published on Apr 25, 2016 in Charts and Graphs, VBA Macros
Earth Venus cosmic dance – Animated chart in Excel

Recently I saw an interesting Earth Venus cosmic dance video on Facebook. See the original video below or here.

Although this is not entirely accurate from physics & astronomy perspectives, the dance is a stunning example of patterns that are generated by simple things.

I wanted to recreate this cosmic dance in Excel. How else am I to get my spreadsheet fix on a Saturday?

Here is a quick demo of the final outcome. Read on to learn more about the Earth Venus cosmic dance.

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How to create cascading drop downs in Excel – video

Published on Aug 31, 2015 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
How to create cascading drop downs in Excel – video

Cascading drop downs enhance usability of your dashboards & interactive workbooks. A cascading drop-down is a 2 or more level selection mechanism. When you have 100s of selection choices, instead of creating one massive drop down or combo-box, you can set up multiple levels of drop downs, so that users can narrow down their selection. For example, users can select Country, State and then City using cascading drop downs.

There are many ways to setup cascading drop downs. You can use formulas coupled with either data validation or form controls. You can also use Slicers. In this video we will review these techniques.

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Narrating the story of change using Excel charts – case study

market-share-changes-over-time

Here are three questions you often hear from your boss:

  1. What changes are happening in our business and how do they look?
  2. Do you know how to operate this new coffee machine?
  3. Why does every list has 3 items?

Jokes aside, our urge to find change in environment predates cave drawing, slice bread and Tommy Lee Jones. So, today let’s examine a very effective chart that tells the story of change and re-create it in Excel.

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Export iPhone contacts to Excel using this free template

Published on Dec 2, 2014 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel, Templates
Export iPhone contacts to Excel using this free template

Recently my iPhone 4 crashed. It is 3.5 years old. And just like any other 3 year old, it started acting weird & crazy one night. The next morning it went silent. It won’t go beyond the Apple logo whenever I start it. Since I couldn’t wait for the phone to start, I took out the SIM card (the phone is unlocked, if you are wondering) and placed it in my old Nokia phone. But alas, none of my contacts are on the SIM. They are in “cloud”.

After a day of answering phone calls from everyone including my mom as “Chandoo here”, I’ve decided to get my contacts back. So I logged in to iCloud to download a backup. And the backup was a .VCF file.

Since I wanted to have all my contact numbers in a spreadsheet, I did what any Excel nerd would do. I built a template that can convert VCF data to Excel worksheet.

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Looking up when data won’t play nice – few more alternatives

Published on Nov 12, 2014 in Learn Excel, VBA Macros
Looking up when data won’t play nice – few more alternatives

Recently, we discussed about the case of unwieldy data and how we lookup what we want using formulas like SUMIFS. Today, let us learn few more ways to solve the same problem.

Suitable structure spawns simple solutions

Poorly structured is the 2nd biggest problem of analysts. The first one is not enough coffee. That is why there is a dictum in the data analytics world.

Structure is everything

So, we can easily solve our lookup problem, if our data were to magically re-arranged in 2 column fashion – Data & Value.

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CP015: Handling big data, Controlling model railroad sets, Overcoming Excel obsession & more – ASK CHANDOO

Published on Jul 24, 2014 in Chandoo.org Podcast Sessions

In the 15th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets answer some of your burning Excel questions.

Handling big data, Controlling model railroad sets, Overcoming Excel obsession & More - ASK CHANDOO

What is in this session?

Around last week, I invited you to ask me anything. More than 150 people responded to this call and sent in their questions. Since answering all the questions is not possible, I handpicked roughly 10 questions to answer in this episode of Chandoo.org podcast.

In this podcast, you will learn,

  1. How to fill blank cells with data from above
  2. How to work with Big data in Excel
  3. How to combine data from multiple sources & analyze it in Excel
  4. How I am managing my life after starting Chandoo.org
  5. How to create and distribute stand-alone Excel products
  6. How to control a model railroad set using Excel VBA (not fully answered)
  7. & more…
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Handle Volatile Functions like they are dynamite

Published on Mar 3, 2014 in Learn Excel, Posts by Jeff
Handle Volatile Functions like they are dynamite

If you’re building large models, then you may want to use volatile functions – including OFFSET(), INDIRECT(), and TODAY() – with caution, because unless you know what you are doing, they *might* slow Excel down to the point that data entry is sluggish, if not downright tedious.

In fact, you *might* want to consider getting out of the habit of using these functions at all if there are alternatives, and you might want to replace volatile functions in your existing models with non-volatile alternatives…I have reduced recalculation time in large models from minutes to milliseconds by doing just that!

So what the heck does volatile actually mean? And why should you care? Let’s find out, shall we?

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Free 2014 Calendar, daily planner templates [download]

Published on Jan 2, 2014 in Learn Excel
Free 2014 Calendar, daily planner templates [download]

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2014 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calender has,

  • One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
  • Daily event planner & tracker
  • 1 Mini calendar
  • Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
  • Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.
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