All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

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.

Let’s say you have data in a worksheet in various ranges, and you want sum up each range at the bottom.

Something like this:

How to do all this one shot?

Simple. We use multi-select & ALT=

This is the final part of our series on how to analyze half a million customer complaints. Click below links to read part 1 & 2.

1. Complaint reason analysis – Part 1
2. Regional trends & analysis – Part 2

Customer satisfaction scorecard

In the previous parts of this case study, we understood what kind of complaints were made and where they came from (states). For the customer satisfaction scorecard, let’s focus on individual companies.

In case, this is the first time you are hearing about Excel formula wildcards, check out the Using wildcards in Excel VLOOKUP formula tutorial.

So you know about wild cards like * ?, now how would you tell VLOOKUP to ignore them?

Say, you are genuinely interested in looking the value “* Payroll” in a lookup table. What then?

This is exactly the problem faced by Peter in our forum post VLOOKUP and cells with “*” NOT to be interpreted as wildcard

Most advanced Excel users know that slicers are cool. Today, let’s learn how to use slicers to create an awesome selection mechanism for your dashboards and forms.

First see a quick demo

Looks slick, eh? Read on.

It seems spreadsheets & dinosaurs on a collision course. How else can you explain Jon’s XKCD Velociraptor problem solved with Excel and now this. Debby, alert reader of our blog sent me this email yesterday.

I need an algebraic formula to solve this in Excel

I have 5 heads, 5 bodies, 4 arm sets, 4 leg sets and 3 tails. I need to see if I can create 1000 dinosaurs from these, and if that’s too many AND I need the 5 digit groupings to prove it and create them.
basically Xa*Xb*Xc*Xd*Xe=1000 – I’m not supposed to go over 1200. […] And then I want the 5 digit combinations if possible – right now they are trying to do the combinations by hand – would be awesome if we could do it in Excel.

A very happy new year to you. May 2016 be your most awesome year yet.

This year too I plan to share tutorials, tips, podcasts & videos to make you awesome. I hope to focus on

• Excel 2016 – exploring new features
• Power BI – What is it, how does it make you awesome.
• Write a sequel to The VLOOKUP Book.
• Launch a new online course on Power BI & New Excel.
• Run 2 more batches of 50 ways to analyze data program in Feb & July 2016.
• Run another dashboard contest on Chandoo.org
• Write about awesome ways to work with data – formulas, charts, tables, pivots etc.
• Talk about many advanced and work specific Excel scenarios in the podcast

But wait, what do you want to learn more…?

While these are my plans, I want to make sure Chandoo.org helps you the best. So please take a minute and answer this one question survey.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2016 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calendar has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

2015 has been the busiest year since starting Chandoo.org.

Wow, that is 12 years of breaking previous records. Thank you.

In 2015, we published 124 posts (down 3% YoY), received 6,300+ comments (up 5%). Our forum too had busy year with 1000s of new members and 5,000+ new threads. Chandoo.org podcast continued to shine, we had 24 episodes this year and reached the 50 episode milestone. Our podcast episodes has been downloaded more than 900,000 so far since launch (in March 2014) with 600,000+ downloads this year alone!!!

Fun fact: People have spent 6.8 million minutes in 2015 listening to Chandoo.org podcast. (assuming only 50% of downloads materialized to listens)

We have trained more than 1,800 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & 50 ways to analyze data program.

Today is a school holiday for kids. So we (Jo & I) are taking them to zoo for a day of walking, picnic and family time. Before I rush, I want to share two quick announcements with you.

KPI contest winners:

Thanks for everyone who participated in our recent KPI data visualization contest. Each and everyone who made the final list is a winner in my book. You have creativity, passion and a sense of sharing.

After reviewing all the entries and considering our judge’s opinions, here are the winners:

Here is an interesting twist on the good old VLOOKUP. How to find the pricing applicable for given quantity of a product?

Something like above.

Looks interesting? Then read on…

Imagine you are the head of training department at ACME Inc. You arrange training programs round the year to empower your team. It is hard work, coordinating between employees, trainers, department heads, venues and coffee machines. What if there is something to help you keep track of all this? I am not talking about getting you a shiny new iPad, you silly. I am talking about a tracker & calendar built in Excel that ties everything together (well, almost everything, you still have to fill the coffee machine.)

We are going to build a training program tracker & calendar using Excel.

Here is a quick homework to keep you busy this weekend.

Can you extract number of days from below text.

Nov15 PUTS (23 days)
March15 TIKS (3 days)
March1 TIKS (25 days)
June11 TIKS (10 days)

Assume the data is from cell A1.

Your solution should return the following:
23
3
25
10

Post your answers (formulas, VBA code or Power Query M code) in the comments.

If you deal with customers or colleagues in Europe, often you may see numbers like this:

• 1.433.502,50
• 9.324,00
• 3,141593

When these numbers are pasted in Excel, they become text, because Excel can’t understand them.

Here is a simple way to convert the European numbers to regular ones.

Use NUMBERVALUE() Function.

This week Excel turned 30. As per wikipedia,

Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985

Let’s celebrate 30 years of Excel by reliving your first memory of it. Share your earliest memory of Excel in the comments section.