Top 10 Excel formulas for IT people

top 10 excel formulas for IT people

Are you in IT & use Excel often? This article explains top 10 formulas for IT professionals. Useful for project managers, IT analysts, Testing people and BAs.

We cover a 10 practical situations and explore various Excel formulas to solve them. Example workbook provides more details too.

Top 10 Excel Formulas for any situation

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Excel has hundreds of formulas. But as a new learner or user, you may want to just focus on top 10 formulas to get the most out of it. Assuming you already know the basics (check out Beginner Excel page if you are complete newbie), here is a list of top 10 Excel formulas for you.

Find them and Extract them – VBA Macro

I started a new consulting gig with NZ Ministry of Business (aside: when I told my daughter about this, she widened her eyes and said ministry of MAGIC!!! ). On my first day, while having lunch in breakout area, I chatted with the gentleman sitting opposite me. We got talking about this and that and eventually the topic turned to What I do at MB. So I told him that I am helping the HR with some data analysis and reporting using Excel & SQL Server. He asks me, “So you must be familiar with Excel object model”. I said, “oh, why yes”. He then asks me, “I have this problem that is bothering me for years. You see, I get a lot of data. And I use Find (Ctrl+F) to find all the cells that contain certain code. But the results are all over the place. I want to know how to extract all the finds to a target worksheet – value & address format.”

I explained him how to do this while chewing mouthfuls of rice & veggies.

But once I am home, I thought, “hey, maybe there are others out in the world who want to do this”.

So here we go.

Can you extract numbers from text – homework

Here is a quick homework to keep you busy this weekend.

Can you extract number of days from below text.

Nov15 PUTS (23 days)
March15 TIKS (3 days)
March1 TIKS (25 days)
June11 TIKS (10 days)

Assume the data is from cell A1.

Your solution should return the following:
23
3
25
10

Post your answers (formulas, VBA code or Power Query M code) in the comments.

How to remove all cells containing John (or anything else) [Quick tip]

Here is an interesting question someone asked me recently,

If I have to delete all rows with “John” in it. Do you know how to do it?

Well, it looks like they really hate John. But it is none of my business.

So lets go ahead and understand a dead-simple way to get rid of all cells with John or whoever else you fancy.