All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

9 box grid is a popular method for talent mapping. Download this free excel template for tracking and visualizing your employee performance & potential data.

In this article, I explain about powerful excel features like FILTER(), SORT() and CONCATENATEX() to create a similar 9 box talent map grid for your data.

Ever wanted to create a two-level data validation list? You can use this simple trick to make two-level or cascading drop-down validation lists in Excel. You need some data, a pivot table and simple IF formulas to get this. Read on to understand the process and create your own two-level drop down lists in Excel.

Got some data in a calendar format and just wished you can get it in tabular format?

You can use Excel formulas or Power Query to do this. In this article, let’s review formula based approach with two excellent choices.

Create a gantt chart with ability to filter by levels. This drill-down gantt chart in Excel is useful for seeing activities by module or team. Read on for full instructions + downloadable template.

Pivot tables are powerful. Use these 6 tricks to save time when working with them. New to Pivot Tables? Check out this intro Are you new to Pivot Tables or just used them a few times? Then check out this excellent getting started with Pivot Tables guide. 1 – Double click to see details Ever […]

Are you in IT & use Excel often? This article explains top 10 formulas for IT professionals. Useful for project managers, IT analysts, Testing people and BAs.

We cover a 10 practical situations and explore various Excel formulas to solve them. Example workbook provides more details too.

I have a fun Excel lookup challenge for you. You have data as shown below and want to find the last non blank value for a given account number. For example, for acct number 2015, the answer would be Freedom. How would you solve this? Refer to this workbook for 3 possible answers. Just move […]

Use TEXTJOIN function to combine text values with optional delimiter. It is better than CONCATENATE because you can pass a range instead of individual cells and you can ignore empty cells too. Here is a sample use of TEXTJOIN Excel function.

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?

Back when I was working as a project lead, everyday my project manager would ask me the same question.

“Chandoo, whats the progress?”

He was so punctual about it, even on days when our coffee machine wasn’t working.

As you can see, tracking progress is an obsession we all have. At this very moment, if you pay close attention, you can hear mouse clicks of thousands of analysts and managers all over the world making project progress charts.

So today, lets talk about best charts to show % progress against a goal.

Do you run an e-commerce website? You are going to love this simple, clear and easy website metrics dashboard. You can track 15 metrics (KPIs) and visualize their performance. The best part, it takes no more than 15 minutes to setup and use. Here is a preview of the dashboard.

Click to download the template.

Excel Dynamic Array Functions are a true game changer. These newly introduced DA functions can filter, sort, remove duplicates and do much more. The output of these functions can go to a range of cells. Hence the name – dynamic array functions.

Welcome to annual Easter Egg hunt at Chandoo.org. This year I have a feast for you. I hid 20 Easter Eggs in this workbook. Go ahead and find them. Share your solutions, clues or struggles in the comments box.

Happy hunting.

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.

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.