All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

Over the weekend, I got an email from Mr. E, one of my students. Mr. E works at a police department in California and as part of his work, he was looking at calls received by police. Whenever police get a call for help, multiple teams can respond to the call and go to the location. All of these dispatches are recorded. So a single call can have several such dispatches. And Mr. E wanted to findout which team responded the first. The problem?

Finding the first responded team is tricky.

Today let’s take up this problem as a case study and understand various methods to solve it.  We are going to learn about writing better lookups, pivot tables, power pivot and optimization. Put on your helmets, cause this is going to be mind blowingly awesome.

So we moved to Wellington, New Zealand few weeks back (on 17th of July 2016, to be precise). After spending first 3 weeks in Jeff’s house and a hotel, we moved in to our rental home over the weekend (on 6th of August). Around the same time, the worst of Wellington winter waved welcome to us. We quickly learned how to stay warm indoors (layers, hot water bottles, rugs and more layers). Kids started going to school few days back and they are loving it. I bought a bike and managed to go out on few rides on the hilly roads of Wellington and found a strange for sale sign too.

Anyhow, Since we didn’t have internet connection until today, I thought I will start by sharing a few Excel links with you. Check them out to get your fix of spreadsheets.

Read on…

Let’s say you have a date in A1 and want to find out future date after 2 years, 4 months and 9 days.

Here are a few formulas you can try.

1. =A1 + DATE(2,4,9)
2. =EDATE(A1, 2*12+4) + 9
3. =A1 + 2*365 + 4*30 + 9

Surprisingly, each formula gives a different result! So which one should you use?

Let’s kick start our Awesome August 2016 with a simple but very useful set of shortcuts. 5 shortcuts, one for each weekday.

1. Monday ALT + M N: Open name manager. Very handy, if you have quite a few range names and want to edit / manage them. Remember, this is a sequence shortcut, that means, you press ALT M, let go of both keys and then press N.
2. Tuesday CTRL + T: Create a new table from data in current region. For more on tables, check out our Introduction to Excel Tables page.
3. Wednesday CTRL + W: Close the current workbook, while keeping Excel open.
4. Thursday ALT + T O: Opens Excel options. Very easy to remember too.
5. Friday CTRL F: Fridays can be hard to concentrate. Use CTRL+F to find what you want in the current workbook. Use CTRL+H if you wish to do a find replace.

Here is an interesting problem to start your day.

Let’s say you work as DNA sequencing engineer at The Enterprise. And you just unlocked the sequence that is responsible for all male problems. The early onset of baldness. The sequence code is AAAA. And you want to find out how many times this sequence is found in a sample of DNA strings, in the range B6:B19. Essentially you want the above.

So how do you write the formula?

Here is a quick & awesome way to make your dashboards sexy. Add an on / off switch to your conditional formats.

Take a look at above demo to understand what I mean.

Okay, this is an extension of the Neither “A” Nor “B” sum problem we discussed few days back.

Imagine you have a table named mydata with a few columns and a stop list named stop.list as shown above.

How would you calculate,

• Sum of Hours for all activities excluding those in stop list?
• Sum of all Regular hours for activities not in stop list?

So go ahead and post your answers in the comments.

We know how to use SUMIFS function to answer questions like, “What is the sum of values for ‘A’?”  But how would you answer questions like,

• What is the sum of values that are neither “A” nor “B”?

We can still use SUMIFS, but it will get awfully long. So let’s turn our attention to other functions in Excel.

Ever wanted to show your workbook to someone and felt that you had less screen real estate? This tip will help you get more out of your workbook.

So how to get 50% more space for your workbooks?

Simple, just follow these steps.

Over the last month we have seen some Excel Tips, Tricks, Cheats & Hacks presented by some of the best Excel practitioners on the internet.
In this final post of the series we highlight the Readers Contributions.

This is second episode of our Monthly Master Class.

In this one, you will learn all about SUMPRODUCT. Know all about basics to advanced usage of this powerful & versatile formula in this 98 minute master class.

Today is Friday the 13th. If you are a raging friggatriskaidekaphobiac, I suggest you to stop reading this post. For the rest of you, I have something fun.

Given a year in cell C3, let’s find out all the months with Friday the 13th. Something like above.

Learn some Excel Tips, Tricks, Cheats & Hacks from some Notable [Non-MVP] Excel Websites.

Learn some of the Microsoft Excel MVP’s favorite Excel Tips, Tricks, Cheats & Hacks in this post
Excel Tips, Tricks, Cheats & Hacks – Microsoft MVP Edition

One of our readers emailed this question recently,

I like the conditional formatting icons. I am trying to present some business data where going down is good. How do I get a green colored down arrow icon?

Essentially, Ms. CanIGetItInGreen wants this:

Unfortunately, Excel’s conditional formatting icons are not customizable. So we can’t get the green down arrows without some sneak. And sneak we shall.