All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

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

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 happens. You check if a donut chunk went in to the key board and some how jammed the ENTER key. So press it again, this time harder. But nothing. Excel […]

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.

The 2018 edition of Commonwealth games are on for a week now. Both of my homes – India and New Zealand have been doing so well. Naturally, I wanted to gather games data and make something fun and creative from it. Here is my attempt to amuse you on this Friday.

Looks interesting? Want to know how to make something like this on your own? Then read on…

Let’s say you have data like this in a spreadsheet. Don’t roll your eyes, I am 102% sure, right at this moment, someone is (ab)using Excel to create similar messy data.

How do you reshape it to one column?

You could use formulas, VBA or Power Query. Let’s examine all these methods to see what is best. All these methods assume your data is in a range aptly named myrange.

It is Easter time. This is the first Easter we are celebrating in our new house. So it is bound to have so many special memories. For last 10 years (wow, it has been a decade of tradition), I have been running Excel based egg hunts every Easter. It all started in 2009, when I was living in Sweden (where Easter is a BIG thing). I had to share the enthusiasm with someone, so I made our first Easter egg hunt on the blog.

This year, join me on an Excel themed cryptic crossword clues – Easter egg hunt. Don’t forget to share your scores and explanations in the comments.

I believe in frugal living and paying yourself first. One of the simple ways to achieve this is by using a budget. You know how much money you get. Once you can track (or estimate) how much you are spending, it is easy to see how much you are paying your future self and what wiggle room you have. So in the spirit of making you awesome in life, not just Excel, let me share a simple but elegant household budget spreadsheet.
Here is a screenshot of the budget.

Let’s start the new year with a bang.

Excel Tables were introduced more than a decade ago, but a lot of people don’t know them or under utilize them. So start this year by becoming a very table genius.

What is Excel Table?

Excel tables are a simple and elegant way to structure and store your data. Let’s say you have staff details like below. Instead of calling it like A1:E72, you can convert this data in to a table and call it, you guessed it right, covfefe (or more coherent option like – staff).

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2018 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calendar has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.