All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag
5 conditional formatting top tips – Excel basics
Time for another round of unconditional love. Today, let’s learn about conditional formatting top tips. It is one of the most useful and powerful features in Excel. With just a few clicks of conditional formatting you can add powerful insights to your data. Ready to learn the top tips? Read on.
Continue »Filter all records for November or 11AM or 2017 [quick tip]
Imagine you are the first officer at ship terminal αε974F1 on remote planet Alderaan. Your job involves looking at terminal log to see anomalies in time space continuum. So one day after getting to work late, thanks to crazy traffic on the floating super way in your settlement, you are looking at latest terminal log for αε974F1 on Excel (of course Excel, what else are you going to use? Notepad?!?) and want to check all the records logged at 7 AM on any day. You don’t have all the time in universe to filter records one at a time. You don’t want to write a formula or something else as it is too early in the morning and the nearest Starbucks is 7 light years away. So what would you do?
Use filters of course.
Continue »Which power plan is best for me? Excel for everyday problems
We had to switch power providers soon, so I started reviewing the options. There are heaps of providers in New Zealand and each offer a ton of different plans. Some offer welcome bonus or credit worth up to $ 200. Other offer straight forward rates. Some others offer discount if you sign up for both electricity and gas with them. So how do you decide which one is better for you?
Using Excel of course.
The result is awesome. I ended up saving more than $1000 with a simple model. Puzzled? Curious? Check out this short but powerful video tut.
Continue »Histograms & Pareto charts in Excel – tutorial, tips and downloadable template
Time for some statistics and charting fun. Let’s learn all about histograms and Pareto charts in Excel 2016. You will learn
- What, why and when?
- How to set up and customize histograms
- How to use Pareto charts?
- How to create dynamic histograms?
- Creating histograms in old Excel (2013 or prior versions)
Sounds interesting? Let’s get started then.
Continue »VLOOKUP that fat table with ease [3 quick tips]
Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig.
If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.
Continue »Convert unevenly spaced list to table [Data from Hell]
Introducing Data from Hell:
Watch out, its data from hell. In this new video series, we are going to examine some nutty, frustrating and fun data reshaping challenges and solve them using Excel. We will use Power Query, Formulas, VBA or other features as needed to free this data from damnation.
For our first installment, let’s reshape unevenly spaced list of values to a table.
Continue »Last week, we talked about how to copy and paste visible cells alone (ie exclude any filtered rows or hidden columns etc.) In the comments section many of you suggested two more ways to deal with this annoying problem. Let’s take a look them.
Continue »Copy & paste visible cells only [Excel Trick]
Here is something annoying with Excel.
Open any Excel file with few columns of data. Hide some of those columns (select the columns and press CTRL+0). Now, copy a few rows of data. Paste it else where. Excel will paste the values in hidden columns too. We thought Excel would omit the values in hidden columns.
What the filter Excel?!? I thought we were friends, but you annoy me with some of these quirks.
Continue »Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]
Game for some charting awesomeness?
Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.
Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?
How about the one above?
Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.
Continue »Use File > Info to quickly unprotect multiple worksheets [Quick tips]
Ever had a workbook with multiple protected worksheets? May be you are enterprise architect at Death Star or chief strategist at Mordor and got all the plans in a tidy little but protected workbook. Of course, you hate having to unprotect many of the worksheets every time you have a new evil plan for world domination. Don’t you worry, you can use this handy little trick to unproect en masse.
- Just open the workbook
- Go to File > Info
- Right on the top, you can see all protected worksheets and a link to unprotect them.
- Click to unprotect the ones you want to.
- Done.
Extract currency amounts from text – Power Query Tutorial
Let’s say you got some text values and want to extract the amounts from them. Something like above.
How to go about it?
We could use a variety of techniques to extract the values.
- Formulas – not easy given the unstructured nature of data. But almost possible. See this for an example.
- VBA – possible, read this forum discussion few ways to do it.
- Power Query – at first glance it might seem tricky, but PQ makes this all too easy. Read on.
Joyplot in Excel
Over on Twitter, I came across this beautiful chart, aptly titled – Joyplot. It is the kind of chart that makes you all curious and awed. So I did what any Excel nerd would do. Recreated it in Excel of course. This post takes you thru the process.
Take a look at final outcome above. Read on to learn more.
Continue »Rounding time to nearest minute or quarter hour etc. [formulas]
The other day, I was building a spreadsheet to calculate FTE (full time equivalent) for staff based on hours worked on various days in a fortnight. While building the spreadsheet, I came across an interesting problem. Rounding Time to nearest minute. We can’t use ROUND() or MROUND() to round time as these formulas aren’t designed to work with time values. Although time values are technically decimal, rounding time to nearest minute (or quarter hour etc.) can be tricky when usual round formulas. Let me share a few formulas to round time to nearest point.
Let’s say you have a time value (either user input or calculated) in cell A1.
Use below formulas to round time in A1.
Continue »SUMPRODUCT Vs. Power Query on Mt. KauKau
When faced with tough problems I react in one of three ways
- Come up with ingenious solutions
- See if a simpler cheat solution is possible
- Sit back and ignore
For most problems, I choose 3rd reaction. Occasionally, I rely on 2nd option and very rarely the first one.
When faced with a tricky time sheet summary problem (as outlined above), after initial lethargy I wanted to solve it.
Continue »Jo, my lovely wife quit her job as my partner in crime at Chandoo.org recently and took up a lucrative position at NZ govt. agency. The other day I asked her “how was your day?” when she got home. She smiled and said, “I learned my first Excel shortcut!”.
Guess what it is?
F4.
That is right. The mighty F4 key. You can use it to repeat any action.
Jo was using it to insert rows in her workbook. After inserting first row (using CTRL+ of course), she would press F4 to add more rows as needed.
Continue »