Author Archive

This is CRAZY!!!. I stumbled on a weird use for FILTERXML() while reading a forum post earlier today. So I couldn’t wait to test it. I am happy to share the results.

Say you have some text (sentence / phrase / keyword etc.) in a cell and you want to extract the nth word. Unfortunately Excel doesn’t have SPLIT() formula. So we end up writing obscenely long array formulas or use gazillion helper columns.

Here is the super sneaky trick. Use FILTERXML() instead.

We can select a few cells in Excel and quickly see their count, sum etc. in the status bar. Ever wanted to customize the status bar to show something else, say difference? You can use VBA add-ins with application level events to achieve this. In this VBA Example, we will look at how to set up a class module, application event in our personal macro add-in to customize status bar.

Over the last few days Microsoft released XLOOKUP formula to the early adopters of Excel. Think of XLOOKUP as VLOOKUP 2.0. In this post, learn all about the function, syntax, optional parameters and 13 xlookup examples.

Waffles are yummy, Power BI is awesome. The combination is going to send your taste-buds on a cruise. Learn how to make a yummy waffle chart in Power BI.

Howdy folks. Almost the end of August here. Let’s wrap it up with a nice little challenge, inspired from my recent consulting gig. Say you are looking at few job titles that look similar and want to match them to correct title.

Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing. Warren Buffet If you ever ask a project manager what they are up to, they will tell you “I have no idea“. So risks are quite common in project management. That is why I made this awesome free Excel risk map template to keep track and […]

We, humans like to compare. Whether we are on Facebook or workbook, we want to compare. So how do you compare two tables and extract common values? Simple, use Excel Power Query. It can merge (a la join) tables and give you the common values.

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.

Ever wanted to highlight maximum value in charts? Then this tip is for you.

Excel pivot tables are very useful and powerful feature of MS Excel. They can be used to summarize, analyze, explore and present your data. In plain English, it means, you can take the sales data with columns like salesman, region and product-wise revenues and use pivot tables to quickly find out how products are performing in each region.

In this tutorial, we will learn what is a pivot table and how to make a pivot table using excel.

Let’s say you are starting at a large dataset with multiple columns. You need to make a pivot report from it for a client or manager. How would you go about it?

Do you know that you can apply conditional formatting rules to visuals in Power BI? In this post, let’s learn how to conditionally format visuals in Power BI. Something like this:

This is an Excel replica of excellent Tableau visual on Tour de France winner data made by Marc Reid.

Last week I saw a stunning visualization on Tour de France using radial charts. I wanted to replicate it in Excel. So here we go.

This is a quick, fun and elegant way to make impressive charts. You can easily create info-graphic style charts in Excel using shape fill technique. Something like this:

Can we predict cricket match score in Excel? Using machine learning, ensemble modeling, multiple regression and Excel formulas we can. This tutorial explains how.