All articles with 'Microsoft Excel Formulas' Tag

Calculating elapsed time is very common whether you are managing a project or raising a baby. Elapsed time is nothing but interval between a starting point and the current point in time. We can use excel formulas to calculate elapsed time very easily. In this post, learn how to calculate elapsed time in days, working days, hours, weeks, months, years, minutes and seconds.

Excel has a very useful feature called “cell comments” using which you can add comment to a cell. This is a very good way to gather remarks and review comments when a workbook is shared with colleagues and others. But what if you have typed a ton of cell comments and now want a way to extract them and do something with that data?

It is no exaggeration that knowing excel formulas can give you a career boost. From someone starting at the long list of numbers, you can suddenly become a data god who can lookup, manipulate and analyze any spreadsheet.

So when our little excel blog hit the 5000 RSS Subscriber milestone, I celebrated the occasion by asking you to share an excel formula through twitter or comments with rest of us. And boy, what an excellent list of formula tips you have shared with us all.
Here is the complete list of entries for the twitter formula contest.

We all know that incell charts are a very cool way to explore and visualize data. Personally I like them so much that I have written several tutorials on it here. Today we will see how a Job dashboard on “50 best cities for finding a job” originally prepared by Indeed job search engine can be recreated in Excel using In-cell charts. The final outcome is something like this.

Here is a quick excel formula tip to start your week. Use ROWS() and COLUMNS() formulas next time you need sequential numbers. What does ROWS() excel formula do? ROWS excel formula takes a range as an argument and tells you how many rows are there in that range. For. eg. ROWS(A1:A10) gives 10. How can you […]

Here is an excel formula quick tip that can come handy when you need to count the number of unique values in a range of cells. Assuming we have a list of values in the range:B5:B15 and we want to know how many unique values are there,
you can use the almighty SUMPRODUCT formula like this: SUMPRODUCT(1/COUNTIF(B5:B15,B5:B15)).

Read the rest of this post to understand how the formula works. You can also find resources to work with duplicate values in excel.

I wrote an excel formulas e-book that makes learning 75 most frequently used excel formulas as simple as eating pie. If you are wondering the book is worth your investment, read these wonderful reviews the book has received from fellow excel bloggers in the community. Jimmy on Code for Outlook and Excel and Tony on Support Analytics.

Time for blowing my own trumpet and patting my own back over my pointy hair. I feel very proud to announce that our little community at Pointy Haired Dilbert now has its five thousandth member.

Take a minute and pat yourself on the back. This is an achievement because of you. Go ahead, I am waiting.

Ok, enough patting. Time for some gifts and fun.

We have 2 contests to celebrate the occasion. This is the first one. I will announce the second contest tomorrow. Read the rest of this post to find out more about the twitter formula contest

In this installment of spreadcheats, we will learn how to use goal seek feature of excel. We will build a retirement savings calculator using excel. We will learn to use Excel’s FV() formula to estimate the corpus that can be accumulated by saving fixed amount every month.

Here is a little formula trick if you need to sum a range of cells based on multiple conditions.

Assuming you have the starfleet, captain and flight data, you can use the good old sum() in an array formula to conditionally sum values meeting multiple criteria. Read on to learn this quick tip.

A burn down chart is a good way to understand the progress of a project. It is like a run chart that describes work left to do versus time. In this tutorial we will learn how to make a burn down chart using excel. This is a bonus installment to the project management using excel series.

Learn how to generate invoice numbers, tax codes etc. using Microsoft Excel. In this example we will take a real life example shared by Michelle and findout how we can generate invoice numbers using excel formulas. Read more to learn and download the example workbook.

The other day I was watching Formula 1 on TV. I think it is the ideal game to follow for a lazy dude like me. It is on every other weekend. It takes .32 seconds to understand the game and 3.2 seconds to know the points and scoring mechanism. But I am not here to convince you to follow the game. While looking at score boards, it struck me,

“how about writing excel formulas for sorting a list of durations (or numbers) in the formula 1 order?”

Cheryl asks via e-mail, “I was wondering if you could help me figure out how to combine the round formula with the rank formula? I need to first round all the numbers and then rank them.”

Of course we can solve this by simply using array formulas. Curious? Find out more by reading the rest of this post.

Here is a quick formula trick you can use to generate sequence numbers that only increment when there is a change. Assuming the sequence of values are in column C from C3, you can write the following formula in B4 onwards (B3 will be 1, wake up…) =IF(C4=C3,B3,B3+1) Now just copy paste the formula over […]