All articles with 'Microsoft Excel Formulas' Tag

I often tell my excel school students that learning VLOOKUP formulas will change your basic approach towards data. You will suddenly feel that you have discovered a superman cape in your attic. It is that awesome.
What does VLOOKUP really do?

Imagine you have a list of data and you want answer a question like, “How many sales did Josh make?”

VLOOKUP is one of the formulas you can use in this situation. VLOOKUP searches a list for a value in left most column and returns corresponding value from adjacent columns.

Learn how to create a birthday reminder worksheet in excel in this video post. You can also download a template to keep track of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries.

Excel Array Formulas have subtle beauty and raw power. Today I want to share how you can use Excel Array Formulas to find-out the 2nd largest sale amount corresponding to a particular product.

Lets say you have sales data like this:
Now, we all know that, to get 2nd largest sale amount, we can use the LARGE() formula. Like this: =LARGE(RANGE,2)

But, how do we know what is the 2nd largest sale amount for the product “bricks”?

Hello Folks.

I have a rather bad news for you. My internet service provider (TATA Photon) has mysteriously blocked chandoo.org. My site hasn’t been loading since Sunday. While, I know it is up and running, I cannot see it unless I go thru a proxy server.

It may take a few days to get this resolved. I am using this time to take a break from blogging and finish reading a few books.

But I have a contest for you that will keep you busy. Share your favorite VLOOKUP tip / trick and you can win an iPod Nano. Read more for rules & how to participate.

Here is a quick home work on excel conditional formatting. Lets say you have data as shown below to left and you need to show zebra lines whenever the value changes (see right). Your home work is simple. Just figure out how to write conditional formatting rules to add zebra lines. The data set is […]

Removing duplicate data is like morning coffee for us, data analysts. Our day must start with it. It is no wonder that I have written extensively about it (here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). But today I want to show you a technique I have been using to dynamically extract and sort […]

This is a guest post written by Paramdeep from Pristine. Chandoo.org is partnering with Pristine to bring an excel financial modeling online training program for you. This is Part 6 of 6 on Financial Modeling using Excel In this tutorial we are going to learn how to build assumptions & input sheets in our excel […]

Here is a little experiment to freak out excel.

Go to cell C3 and write =C3 and press Enter. Excel would throw up nasty message saying, “Microsoft did not know what to do. We have a sent a support engineer to your home, but he is stuck at the round-about near your house.”

Well, not really. But what you did when you wrote the formula =C3 in cell C3 was, you created a circular reference.

A circular reference is created when you refer to same cell either directly or indirectly.

See Mona Lisa, in circular reference style.

Learn more about Excel Circular References, how to use them, examples, how to avoid them, how to deal with them in this article.

Ok, since excel school 3rd batch is going to open on 15th, I wasnt going to write anything today. I have slept just 4 hours last night, blame it on work (and that funny video on youtube). But I found 30 minutes free time, so here you go, a quick but delicious tip on making your data validation dynamic.

Dynamic Data Validation?!? What in the name of slice bread and peanut butter is that?

See the demo aside to understand and read on to master the trick.

This post builds on earlier discussion, How many hours did Johnny work? I recommend you to read that post too. Lets say you have 2 dates (with time) in cells A1 and A2 indicating starting and ending timestamps of an activity. And you want to calculate how many workings hours the task took. Further, lets […]

In the 4th and 5th part of our financial modeling series, we will learn how to model and build cashflow projections for project valuation.

We will understand the basics behind cash-flow modeling, what kind of non-cash expenses should be added back to get the free cash-flow. You can also get the blank and completed cash-flow projection worksheets to practice these techniques.

Dynamic charts are like my favorite food, Mangoes. They tempt, tease and taste awesomely. In this post, we are going to learn how to create a dynamic chart using check boxes and formulas as shown in the animation aside. Are you ready for some excel chart cooking?

You can also download a FREE Dynamic chart template from the post. So go ahead and make your boss drool.

Today we have home work for you. You need to help Johnny figure out how many hours he worked on splitting atoms. He has crazy boss who is behind him for that timesheet. Now Johnny needs your help to write the correct formula so that he can tell his boss how many hours he worked and go home.

Go ahead and read rest of this post and tell your answers using comments. Go!

As part of our Reader Awesomeness Week, Francis shares with us a travel site dashboard he made for his company. Francis took just two days to prepare this awesome dashboard which uses concepts like bullet charts, sortable KPI grid, Date based filtering, dynamic charts and more. I was really moved by Francis’ gesture in sharing his work with us, so much that, I did a video review of his work. You can see it in the embedded youtube video to the left.

Read the rest of the article to know how this dashboard is made and get a copy of the file.

Few days back we have learned how to find if 2 sets of dates overlap using Excel Formulas. For eg. we have learned that to check whether {1 July,2010 to 23 July 2010} overlaps with the date range {15 July, 2010 to 16 August 2010}, we can use a formula like, =if(or(and(x>=a,x<=b),and(a>=x,a<=y)), “Overlap”,”Do not overlap”) […]