All articles in 'Excel Howtos' Category

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?

Ever wanted to make an area chart with up down colors, something like this? Then this tip is for you.

Ever wanted to convert numbers to words in Excel? For example, 456,123 becomes four hundred fifty-six thousand one hundred twenty-three.

Microsoft recently introduced LET function to Excel. This allows us to create variables on the fly to use within a formula. I just made a words from number formula using LET function and bit of good old INDEX.

Read on to learn how this all works.

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.

Do you want to create a simple, elegant and useful tracker using Excel? You can make trackers with features like tables, data validation rules and conditional formatting. In this page, I will explain the process for creating an Excel tracker.

Excel pivot tables are very useful and powerful feature of MS Excel. They are 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.

As part of our Excel Interview Questions series, today let’s look at another interesting challenge. How can you analyze more than 1 million rows data in Excel?

You may know that Excel has a physical limit of 1 million rows (well, its 1,048,576 rows). But that doesn’t mean you can’t analyze more than a million rows in Excel.

The trick is to use Data Model.

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.

Here is a very useful and almost secret Excel tip for you. Imagine you are looking at a big, complex workbook with lots of calculations. You want to understand where everything is pointing to and how the workbook is set up.

You can use trace precedents in Excel to do this. Read this tip to learn how it works.

Learn how to make a Circular Arc Chart in Excel.

We all know that VLOOKUP can find first match and return the results. But what if you want all the matches? Use this simple trick instead.

Hui’s World is an advanced Excel animated chart displaying the Earth, Continents, Countries and States and key geographical features.
This post will describe how it works and how it was made.

We all know VLOOKUP (or INDEX+MATCH) as an indispensable tool in our Excel toolbox. But what if you want the lookups to be a little gentler, nicer and relaxed?

Let’s say you want to lookup the amount $330.50 against a list of payments. There is no exact match, but if we look 50 cents in either direction, then we can find a match. Here is a demo of what I mean.

Unfortunately, you can’t convince VLOOKUP to act nice.

Hey VLOOKUP, I know you are awesome and all, but can you cut me some slack here? 

VLOOKUP is tough, reliable and has a cold heart. Or is it?

In this post, let’s learn how to do lenient lookups.

Learn to how perform Maths on Tables of Numbers in Microsoft Word.