Save time & paper with print areas in Excel
Here is a very simple but effective tip: use print areas. Oh.. but what is a print area? Imagine looking at a report or dashboard worksheet. Now, that sheet also has few calculations, some extra stuff to the right of the report. When you print, you don’t need those extra elements. Just the report will do. This […]
How to import web data to Excel using Power Query
Power Query offers many ways to get data to Excel. One of them is to Web Data import feature. Let’s understand how this works by importing world stock exchange closing data from Google Finance website.
[Related: Introduction to Power Query]
Use mail merge to create custom letters, invoices, labels and more
The idea of mail merge is simple & powerful. Imagine you handle recruitment at a large company. You just hired 300 analysts for the big data division. The next job – generate employment offer letters for each of them. Of course, you don’t want to type these letters one at a time. You have the details of all the 300 offers (name, email, address, offer code, role, benefit package details and date of joining etc.) in a spreadsheet. You also have a template of the offer letter.
Enter mail merge. This powerful feature of MS Word combines (Excel) data with Word document contents to generate all the 300 letters in just few minutes.
A simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly [video]
Whenever you have a dashboard that is quite long or spans across multiple worksheet tabs, it can be hard to use. Here is a simple trick to make your dashboards user friendly. If your dashboard has form controls, create duplicate sets of them and place them in locations where users are looking. For example, If your […]
Work with charts faster using selection pane & select object tools [quick video tip]
Working with multiple charts (or drawing shapes / images) can be a very slow process. But here is a secret to boost your productivity.
Use selection pane & select object tools
Selection Pane & Select Objects?
If you have never heard of these, don’t worry. These are 2 very powerful features hidden in Excel. Once you know how to unlock them, you will never look back.
How to use selection pane & select object tools to work with charts faster – Video
In this video, understand how to use these powerful features to work with charts faster.
Format faster with paste special & double click [video]
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 the last value
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”.