All articles with 'help' Tag

VLOOKUP may not make you tall, rich and famous, but learning it can certainly give you wings. It makes you to connect two different tabular lists and saves a ton of time. In my opinion understanding VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH worksheet formulas can transform you from normal excel user to a data processing beast. Today, […]

I am stuck with an excel problem and I need your help. While trying to insert an image in to my excel 2007 workbook using VBA I hit on this weird error and not able to use the ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert method. Do you know why?

Good news!!! We have upgraded the excel formula help page to a new, more easily accessible and better laid out page. Find out more…

Remember the PHD Excel Formula Helper Tool? Good, now it is available as an e-book, so that you can take a print out of all the formulas or save it on your disk and learn formulas at leisure.

For 5 $ you can buy this e-book and read it at your leisure.

A combination chart is when you combine two different charts to make one. A popular example for combination chart is a line & bar graph combination.

A very quick spreadcheat for Friday. If you need to type content in a cell and you want to see it multiple lines then use alt + enter to break the content in several lines. See to the right for an example.

Bonus tip: If you are using formulas to create content in a cell by combining various text values and you want to introduce line breaks at certain points … For eg. you are creating an address field by combining house number, street name, city and zip code and you want to introduce line breaks after house number and street name then you can use CHAR(10).

PHD reader and commenter Vishy contributed this post through e-mail. Thank you so much Vishy for this very useful tip. The Problem: You have created a specific view of your data in Excel (say by filtering, zooming out, changing column width, hiding specific rows, customizing window settings, print settings etc.). This is your reference point […]

Can you imagine building a complex worksheet without formulas? I can’t. While no one can dispute the usability of formulas, we all know how painful it is when an excel formula returns a mysterious error and we don’t know what is causing the error.

One of the most common comments we get here is “how does xxx formula works?” Even though there is vast documentation on excel formulas including the built-in help in MS Office, often it is difficult for us to learn a formula quickly and use it in a snap. So to help new users of excel […]

Do you know that while recording macros in excel you can use the relative reference based recording so that you can use your macro anywhere and the references would be adjusted automatically? Yes! I have learned this yesterday and I thought it is pretty cool. Here is how you can make your macro VBA code […]

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 […]