All articles with 'find replace' Tag

Imagine you have a paragraph of text and you want to replace all occurrences of {four, normal, mysterious, nonsense} with {six, casual, confounding, handbags}. How would you do that?

You could use SUBSTITUTE() formula, but you need to nest four of them (as we need to replace four values with another four). But what if you have larger set of find / replacements?

Worry not, you can use Power Query to transform original text to new one by replacing all matching values.

In this page, learn how to do that with the excellent List.Accumulate() Power Query function.

So you have built that excel report your boss wanted. And you were all eager to use the spreadsheet in your presentation. But in the last minute, your boss asked you to change average sales to total sales figures. You also want to grab an espresso before rushing to the meeting. Now what?

As part of a my ongoing consulting gig, I often run painfully long queries on SQL Server to fetch data. This data obviously ends up in Excel for further analysis. Now, some of these queries return NULL values in several columns (did I tell you that the queries have a gazillion left joins on them, oh yeah, they do). Although technically NULL is nothing, when you import this data to Excel, we get the text value NULL in the cells. And I don’t need these NULL values messing up all the calculations and pivots.

Of course, we can go ahead and use the isnull() SQL function to deal with them at the query level. But since the queries have 100s of columns and used by various teams for different purposes, changing them causes a lot of pain. So I did what any sensible Excel user would do. Just kill those NULLs mercilessly once they are in Excel.

We are on a tiki tour around NZ. So far we have been to Taupo & Rotorua. And we are doing what you do when you are on a holiday – being lazy, going on walks, swimming in lakes, eating copious amounts of food and getting lost. Of course, all this means, I have very little time to access to internet & my blog. So the updates will be slow for next two weeks. Here is a quick tip (well, two of them) to keep you busy and awesome.

How to remove ugly formatting from your workbooks?

Do you have a colleague or boss (shudder) that loves to apply their special touches to every workbook their mouse lands on? Do you constantly wince and whine when you have to work on that spreadsheet.

Here are two handy ways to restore your data to its original glory.

Clear formats:

Simple, select the data you want formatting gone from, go to Home > Clear > Formats.

And Excel will weave an expelliformat spell at your data and make it clean.

Here is a quick demo.

On Friday, we learned how to transpose a table of data using Excel formulas. Today lets learn a quicker & easier way to do this by just using copy, paste, find & replace.

The best thing about Excel is that you can do the same thing in several ways. Our yesterdays problem – Extracting file name from full path is no different. There are many different ways to do it, apart from writing a formula. Learn these techniques to be a data extraction ninja.

1. Using find replace
2. Using text to columns
3. Using UDFs

This is part 2 of 6 on Profit & Loss Reporting using Excel, written by Yogesh Data sheet structure for Preparing P&L using Pivot Tables Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet Adding Calculated Fields to Pivot Table P&L Exploring Pivot Table P&L Reports Quarterly and Half yearly Profit Loss Reports in Excel Budget V/s […]

In this week’s excel links, we will learn how to jump to next cell during data entry, an array formula trick to include all values conditionally, about auto-filters in excel and much more.

The first installment of “your week @ PHD” features 4 excel tips shared by our readers: (1) A macro to unhide all sheets (2) a KPI Dashboard with VBA and Charts (3) Using Excel’s Find to Save time at work (4) An Array Formula to Solve a Tricky Problem.

Many of us use spreadsheets to manage huge lists of data, like customer data bases, salesperson data bases etc. Today we will learn a little conditional formatting trick that you can use to search a worksheet full of data and highlight the matching cells.