One of the most useful features of Excel is formula help box. You know the little yellow box that appears as soon as you start typing a formula in a cell. I use this all the time to understand what the syntax of a particular function is, what parameters to pass etc.
Although I love it, sometimes it does get in the way when writing formulas. Because the help box sits on top of my data, often I find it hard to know which cell to link to.
Solution?!?
Simple. Use your mouse to move away the help box wherever you want.
- Place your mouse pointer on the edge of help box.
- Your mouse pointer changes to four sided move arrow. Like this:
- Just move the help box by dragging it anywhere you want.
See this demo:
Thanks to Stan Brown for sharing this tip with me.
Bonus tip for you
Press CTRL+A as soon as you typed formula name to open the Function Arguments box, where you can specify each parameter interactively.
Your mouse can do so much more…
Often we focus on learning keyboard shortcuts to be productive. But do you know that mouse shortcuts can save you tremendous amount of time, simplify your work and exercise your muscles just a bit? That is right.
Go ahead and test your mouse by clicking on below links 😉
2 Responses to “Celebrating the Lookup Formulas – VLOOKUP Week @ Chandoo.org”
How did you arrive or formula when you ask me who made more sales Jackie or Jamie?? I could not figure the formula out yet??
@Frank
You need to sum up the sales for Jackie and compare them to the sales of Jamie over the same period.
The practical parts depends on how and what data you have and how it is arranged.
But it will either involve a Sum, Sumif, Sumifs or Sumproduct to accummulate the sales for each within a specified date range.