All articles in 'Excel Howtos' Category

Moosa, one of our readers emailed this interesting question:

I have huge list of customers (around 1500).
Table includes following information
Customer # , Customer Name, Sales 2002, sales 2003, … sales 2012

My requirements are
1. list of customer who did not have sales during all these years
2. List of customer who have not business from 2003
3. List of customer who have not business from 2004

Today, lets learn how to identify all the non-performing customers.

Lets talk round numbers today.I have 18.2 tips for you on round numbers.

We can use a variety of formulas to round numbers in Excel depending on the situation. We have ROUND, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN, MROUND, INT, TRUNC, CEILING, FLOOR, FIXED, EVEN, ODD and few more. To know how to use all these formulas and how to round numbers based on any criteria, just read on.

Zebra lines, the dull highlighting applied to alternative rows is a very good way to make your tables readable & pretty.

We can use either conditional formatting or table formats to quickly add zebra lines to our data.

But what if you want a little more?

What if you want to highlight, lets say 3 rows in one color and 3 in another and repeat this …

Here is a formula challenge for you. Lets say we have 2 lists of values in A1:A10 & B1:B10 Now, how do you find the number of common values in both lists? We just want the count, not list of common values it self. Go ahead and figure out the formula and post your answers […]

Can we make a calendar using Pivot Tables?!? Of course we can. Today let us learn a simple technique to create calendar style reports using Pivot tables. Thanks to Rob for inspiration Before making any progress, let me thank Rob from PowerPivotPro for the inspiration. Recently he wrote an article explaining how to use PowerPivot […]

Sometimes you want to turnoff decimal points if the value after point is 0. Mireya, Chandoo.org member had one such situation. She writes:

I am a complete beginner in excel, how can I keep the zeros when I am working with decimals and remove them when are not required.

This is where we can use General formatting. Read on to learn how General formatting works and what to do in extreme cases.

So who is up for a challenge? Can you use only formulas and extract dates buried inside text?

1. Download this file.
2. In column C, write a formula such that you can extract the date in column B
3. If you succeed, post your solution here as a comment.
4. If you fail, drink some coffee, start afresh.

Everyone likes to be in control. Even my 2 year old daughter jumps with joy when she lays her hands on TV remote. She pushes the buttons and assumes it is working. It is another story that we rarely watch TV at home.

By adding an element of control, we can make our dashboard reports fun. Interactive elements like form controls, slicers etc. invite users to play with your dashboard, get involved and understand data by asking questions. That is why I recommend making dashboards interactive.

Today lets understand how you can make dashboards interactive.

Each new sheet in MS Excel comes up with a 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. While it has a certain binary romantic ring to it (2^20 rows & 2^14 columns), I am yet to meet anyone using even half the number of rows & columns Excel has to offer.
So why leave all those empty rows & columns hanging in your reports?

Would it not look cool if your reports showed only few rows & columns as needed, like this:

When looking at a big table of analysis (or data), it would make our life simpler if the selected cell’s column and row are highlighted, so that we can instantly compare and get a sense of things. Like above.

Who doesn’t like a little highlighting. So lets learn how to do highlighting today.

Have you ever wanted to make your own Custom Chart type ?
MarnieB was asked by her boss to make a Spoke Chart !

This post will explain how you can make a custom Excel Spoke Chart and introduce you to techniques that can be used to make other custom chart types.

A while ago (well more than 3 years ago), I wrote about an array formula based technique to check if a list of values have any duplicates in them.

Today, lets learn a simpler formula to check if a list has duplicate numbers.

Assuming you have some numbers in a range B4:B10 as shown below, we can use MODE + COUNTIF formulas to check if there are any duplicate values in a list.

Last week we discussed how to extract numbers from text in Excel using formulas. In comments, quite a few people suggested that using VBA (Macros) to extract numbers would be simpler.

So today, lets learn how to write a VBA Function to extract numbers from any text.

Often we deal with data where numbers are buried inside text and we need to extract them. Today morning I had such task. As you know, we recently ran a survey asking how much salary you make. We had 1800 responses to it so far. I took the data to Excel to analyze it. And surprise! the numbers are a mess. Here is a sample of the data.

Here is a quick tip that I learned while conducting training classes in Australia. If you have several dates in a range and you want to find out what the latest date is, just use MAX, like: =MAX(A1:A10) would give you the latest date. A Question…, Assuming you have some dates (not necessarily sorted) in […]