Extract the 10 digit number [formula homework]
Okay, time for another challenge.
Imagine you have some data like this. Each cell contains 3 numbers separated by line break – CHAR(10) and you need to extract the number that is 10 digits long.

Go ahead and solve this riddle.
Can you extract numbers from text – homework
Here is a quick homework to keep you busy this weekend.
Can you extract number of days from below text.
Nov15 PUTS (23 days)
March15 TIKS (3 days)
March1 TIKS (25 days)
June11 TIKS (10 days)
Assume the data is from cell A1.
Your solution should return the following:
23
3
25
10
Post your answers (formulas, VBA code or Power Query M code) in the comments.
Save a range as text file using VBA [tutorial]
Last night I asked members of our Chandoo.org facebook page to share an Excel problem you are struggling with. Francis asked,
How to save a file as .txt in vba without quotes? When I save as .txt, the file has got quotes inside of it. I used the code Print, but it didnt work because the file loses its delimitation.
Does anyone know how to solve this?
Let’s understand how to save a range as text and overcome the double quote problem.
Use NUMBERVALUE() to convert European Number format
If you deal with customers or colleagues in Europe, often you may see numbers like this:
- 1.433.502,50
- 9.324,00
- 3,141593
When these numbers are pasted in Excel, they become text, because Excel can’t understand them.
Here is a simple way to convert the European numbers to regular ones.
Use NUMBERVALUE() Function.
Case Sensitive Lookups
We all know that VLOOKUP (and its cousins MATCH, HLOOKUP and LOOKUP) are great for finding information you want. But they are helpless when you want to do a case-sensitive lookup.
So how do we write case sensitive VLOOKUP formulas?
Simple. We can use EXACT formula.
How to find out if a text contains question? [Excel formulas]
On Wednesday (15th July), I ran my first ever webinar, on a topic called, “How to be a BETTER Analyst?” (here is the replay link, in case you missed it). It was a huge success. More than 1,100 people attend the live webinar and hundreds more watched the replay. As part of the webinar, we had interactive Q&A. Viewers posted their questions and I replied to as many of them as I can.
After the webinar, I wanted to make sure I covered all the questions. So I downloaded the chat history. There were more than 700 messages in it. And I am not in the mood to read line by line to find-out the questions. A good portion of chat messages were not questions but stuff like ‘hello everyone, I am from Idaho’, ‘Wow, Chandoo has beard!”, “Enjoying a beer in Belgium while watching webinar” etc. So I wanted a quick way to flag the messages as question or not.
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.