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Table styles to change the look & feel of your Excel tables

Excel Howtos

Excel Tables Tutorial & 13 Tips for making you a Data Guru

Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.

What is an excel table?

Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”

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June 13, 2018

Learn Excel

Best Excel Books & Power BI Books – 2018

So you have decided to up your game with Excel and / or Power BI this year and now ravenously looking for books to read. You have come to the right place. Here is my list of recommended best Excel books, and books on Power BI, visualization, dashboards, VBA, Macros and analytics.

Use below links to navigate the relevant section of this page:

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June 11, 2018

Power Query

FIFA Worldcup 2018 Excel Tracker – FREE Download

FIFA world cup 2018 is around the corner. I love soccer, I love Excel, Let’s marry them. Here is an awesome, free FIFA world cup Excel Tracker to help you follow this year’s games in Russia.

Click here to download the FIFA worldcup 2018 tracker.

What you can do with this FIFA world cup Tracker Excel?

You can use this tracker to,

View schedules in your local time for group and knockout stages
View summary and detailed points table
Refresh live points table. When you refresh, the tracker show updated points based on latest results (You need Excel 2016, Office 365 or older versions of Excel with Power Query)
View knockout stage matches as a bracket
See timeline of the matches

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June 7, 2018

Learn Excel

Introduction to Excel SUMIFS Formula

Excel SUMIFS function is used to calculate the sum of values that meet any criteria. For example, you can calculate the total sales in east zone for product Pod Gun using SUMIFS formula.
In this article, you will learn:

What is SUMIFS function and how to use it?
Syntax for SUMIFS
Using SUMIFS() with tables and structural references
SUMIFS examples – simple, wild card
Using SUMIFS() with date & time values
Free sample file for SUMIFS formula
More formulas for data analysis

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May 25, 2018

Excel Howtos

Excel formula showing as text instead of actual result – How to fix the problem

Once in a while everyone is bound to come across this problem. You type a formula in a cell, then you press ENTER. Bam! nothing

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May 24, 2018

Pivot Tables & Charts

Distinct count in Excel pivot tables

Ever wanted to count distinct values in your pivot tables? Something like above:

Let’s say you have store sales data. Several products are sold on each day. When you make a pivot table from this data and add product count, Excel counts all products. But we want to see just the distinct count (ie if there is a duplicate product in a day, we want to count it just once).

Here is a simple trick to add distinct count to Excel pivot tables easily.

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May 23, 2018

Charts and Graphs

Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you

Call them by any name – Budget vs. Actual, Target vs. Actual, Goal vs. Progress, KPIs, Performance charts, but they are the bread and butter of business charting. So how about a drop dead gorgeous and insightful chart for your next meeting with the folks upstairs? Something like above.

Read on to learn how to create this chart in Excel.

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May 16, 2018

Charts and Graphs

60 sports in six charts

On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.

First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.

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May 14, 2018