My name is Chandoo. My mission is to make you awesome in Excel and Power BI. I do this by sharing Excel & Power BI tutorials, examples, tips, videos and articles on this website. I live in Wellington, New Zealand with my beautiful wife Jo & our twins Nishanth & Nakshatra. Take a minute to browse various topics of the site to see how I can help you.
Making your workbooks, charts, dashboards & presentations beautiful is a time consuming process. It is a mix of art & craft. Naturally, we spend hours polishing that important slideshow or visualization. But do you know about simple features in Excel that can save you a lot of time and help you create gorgeous output?
VLOOKUP is one of the most useful Excel functions. So much so that I even wrote a book about it. But it has one serious limitation.
It looks up the first occurrence and returns corresponding data.
What if you want to find the last value?
Say, for example, you are looking at a task assignment list and want to know what is the last task assigned to employee Emp13?
We want to extract the task “Make amazing workbook”. Of course our good old VLOOKUP stops once it finds Emp13 and returns the answer as “Create intuitive workbook”.
To make friends in a new town hit the bars – Old saying. To make sense of a new data-set, make bar charts – New saying.
Bar charts (or column charts if you like your data straight up) are vital in data analysis. They are easy to make. But one problem. By default, a bar chart show the original data in reverse order.
See the above example.
Unfortunately, we humans read from top to bottom, not the other way around.
Conditional formatting is one of the most powerful & awesome features of Excel. It is very easy to setup. Naturally, people use it extensively. But the default conditional formatting rules can clutter your reports. Here is one tip that can declutter your reports.
In the 41st session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s take a trip to data hell and meet 6 ugly, clumsy, confusing charts. I am revisiting a classic Chandoo.org article – 6 Charts you will see in hell.
A significant portion of our time in Excel is spent navigating between various ribbon tabs and clicking buttons. Wouldn’t it be better if you can combine all the frequently used features in to one ribbon?Something like above:
Read on to learn how to create, edit and share custom ribbons in Excel.
Power BI is the most exciting thing to happen for your data since spreadsheets. If you are looking for a new skill to learn this year, I highly recommend Power BI. Check out below tutorials and get started today.
A relative told me about your website since I need help creating pivot tables, I learned how to do it in a matter of minutes thanks to your tutorial. Where have you been all of my excel troubled life, I look forward to viewing your videos on youtube as well as on your site. You are going to make me EXCELLENT at Excel!
Soulful Sista
Excel Sister
Hi Chandoo,
I just want to say I really appreciate your Excel tutorials and all your hard work that it took to compile the huge library of content. Your site has helped me gain a better understanding of Excel which has helped me in my job.
You are helping the world!
Felix H
Accountant
Throughout my life as an administrative assistant; your site has been invaluable to me. And now that I’m a recruiter; it’s still an amazing resource for when I need to teach someone something quickly.
You are a friggin’ Rock Star!!!
Thank you for everything you do.
Learn how to work with data, make calculations, pivots, create amazing charts and powerful dashboards from scratch using Excel School + Dashboards program. Suitable for analysts, managers or professionals who need to use Excel often.
Use VBA to automate your tasks and build powerful spreadsheet based apps. In this course, learn all about how to program with VBA, how to use the language and object model to your advantage. Suitable for people who build a lot of things with Excel.
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