With this post we are starting a new series on how to do basic accounting in Microsoft Excel. In this and next 5 posts, we will aim to setup Profit & Loss account reporting for multi-location retail company.

During this series we will learn how to make P&L reports on various criteria with just few clicks.

Many users find it difficult to manage their P&L reporting for Multi Location organization.

We will be using Pivot Tables for our reporting purpose and will take example of a Retails chain with multiple locations divided into various regions.

Okay, this is a cop-out, but I have been busy and not-in-a-mood-for-writing in the last 2 days. (I don’t know, but I feel a bit low, may be it is all the snow around and constant work due to excel school and day job).

So, let us have an open thread on Excel Shortcuts. I will start by listing down all the excel keyboard shortcuts I use regularly,

Here is a typical scenario: We want to allow only one of the pre-defined customer names in our spreadsheet. We have listed down all the customers in column B and want excel to check against this list and validate the data. But there are 3 problems. (1) Our list is not sorted alphabetically (2) It contains duplicates and (3) The list comes from external source, so we can not remove duplicates and sort the list every time.

Now how can we set up a simple data validation list that would not repeat customer names and shows them in sorted order like this.

Read the rest of this guest post by Hui to learn how to use data validation in creative new ways.

Welcome to another edition of excel links. During the last week, I have revised excel downloads page on PHD and now it contains over 75 excel templates, tutorial downloads. I am not sure if you dig the new format of the page though. So go take a look at it and let me know what […]

Sometimes we get values in our Excel sheets in such a way that the % sign is omitted. So instead of the value being 23%, it is 23. Now, you can very easily correct this by editing the cell and adding a % sign at the end. But what if you have 100s of rows of data. You can’t do this to every cell. (You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then). There must be some simple and intuitive solution for this … umm.

We, data junkies, love pivot tables. We think pivot tables are solution for everything (except for may be global warming and that broken espresso machine down stairs).

Today, we are going to learn 5 awesome pivot table tricks that will make you a star.

Blank rows or Blank cells is a problem we all inherit one time or another. This is very common when you try to import data from somewhere else (like a text file or a CSV file). Today we will learn a very simple trick to delete blank rows from excel spreadsheets. Read this post to findout how to delete blank rows / cells from your excel data in a snap.