All articles with 'Microsoft Excel Formulas' Tag

If for every countif() I write excel paid me a dollar, I would be a millionaire by now. It is such a versatile and fun formula to work with that I have decided to write about it as third post in our spreadcheats series. Using COUNTIF() to replace pivot tables: We all know that you […]

If you ever need to know whether a particular word is repeated in a cell (for eg: a file extension or telephone number or name of the customer) here is how you can find it. =if(lower(cell-with-text)<>SUBSTITUTE(lower(cell-with-text),lower(word-to-check),””,2),”Yes”,”No”) We are using substitute() to replace the second occurance of a particular word and then compare this with original […]

Often I wish Microsoft had spent the effort and time on a data genie (and a set of powerful formulas) that can automate common data cleanup tasks like extracting duplicates, makings lists unique, find missing items, remove spaces etc. Alas, instead they have provided features like clippy which are intrusive to say the least. So […]

This is the first installment of the spreadcheats series. I have used excel an year and half before I learned about the relative and absolute references. It was such a joyous feeling to find out that you can actually write one (or just a few) formulas and use the power of auto-fill to do the […]

The World’s First Music Video in Excel ACDC Rock n Roll Train This is totally cool. ACDC released an ASCII version of their “rock n roll train” video through excel spreadsheet. Why? So that you can download it at your office and watch it while your boss thinks you are working. 😀 I think this […]

This is a Guest Post by Robert on Visualization Techniques for Excel KPI Dashboards. This 6 Part Tutorial on Management Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs in the […]

Sorting text is such a day to day activity that it always surprises me why Excel hasn’t provided a simple spreadsheet formula for doing it. Of course you can use the sorting menu command (menu > data > sort) but this requires manual steps (or VBA). Most of the times we get raw textual data […]

Often when you are working on 2 incompatible systems and try to import data from one to another, excel can be a handy tool. I have used excel plenty of times to generate SQL insert / update statements which I could later execute on the database console. Here is a tutorial if you ever have […]

In India salary is usually paid on the last working day of a month – the payday. It is slightly different in countries where payrolls are processed every 2 weeks. For eg. in US most companies pay salary on every 2nd Friday / Thursday. We can calculate the paydays / payroll periods in excel with […]

We have a major power outage in Ohio due to a wind storm on Sunday. AEP, Our electric provider says that power would be restored to my area by this Friday midnight, that is almost 6 days without power. I will not be able to blog regularly during this period. So here is a list […]

Often when you are processing text using excel it is important to split the text in to multiple parts based on a delimiter. For eg. you may want to divide this|needs|to|be|split in to five parts this needs to be split. There is a simple way to do this in excel, using “import text” option. But […]

Often when you are processing customer records or doing mail merge, it might be useful to get initials from a given name, like JFK for John F Kennedy. You can do this using simple text formulas (left(), mid(), find()) combined with if(). Here is how: Assuming cell B3 has the full name, then this is […]

Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 6 posts by Robert from Munich, Germany. This 6 Part Tutorial on KPI Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 […]

Google docs spreadsheet app is going mainstream with each passing day. Recently they have introduced split() formula to divide text in to multiple cells using a user specified delimiter. The syntax for this function is =split(text value, delimeter), for eg. =split(“pointy haired dilbert”, ” “) would result in 3 individual cells with “pointy”, “haired” and […]

Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel is a series of 6 posts by Robert. This 6 Part Tutorial on KPI Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs in the […]