All articles with 'quick tip' Tag

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.

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.

Two most commonly asked or searched queries when it comes to charting are,

• How to combine two chart types in one chart, like a line chart combined with bar chart?
• How to add a secondary axis to the chart so that one or more data series are plotted on the secondary axis?

Watch this video tutorial to learn how to do both in less than 15 seconds.

Watch it on youtube: Creating combination charts and adding secondary axis – video tutorial

Here is a very quick tip if you ever want to hide a cell’s contents in excel

Just use the custom cell formatting (more here) code ;;;

Here is a quick excel printing tip. Use the page setup options from print preview area of the spreadsheet to select how you want to handle the formula errors when the worksheet is printed. You can set it to blank from the “sheet” tab of the page setup dialog in Microsoft excel

Here is a fun way to edit formula ranges. Just select the formula, press F2 and when you see the borders around the ranges used in that formula start dragging / resizing these borders to edit the formula range.

A simple label formatting hack can improve the effectiveness of YoY change charts by adding color to differentiate positive vs. negative growth (or mediocre vs. sky rocketing growth rates). See this example:

Here is a very quick spreadcheat for the new year.

If you need to select all the cells in a series (either row-wise or or in columns) you can use one of these 2 shortcuts (and avoid unnecessary scrolling)

1. Select the first cell in the series

2. Press Shift + Ctrl + Down arrow

Or

1. Select the first cell in the series

2. Hold down SHIFT and Double click on the edge of cell in the direction you want to select

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).

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.

Dashboards let users get all the information they want in a quick glance. Not if users start using scroll bars and scroll down to cell A64000. So here is a quick and dirty trick. Assuming your dashboard ends in row 40, select row 41 and go to menu > window > freeze panes. That way […]

Here is a simple copy pasting tip. Next time when you want to paste a set of copied cells to another area, instead of using CTRL+V, just use ENTER. See this: Learn 16 more excel copy pasting tricks today.

Here is a quick excel number formatting tip. If you ever want to format numbers in such a way that it shows decimal values only if the number is less than 1 you can use conditional custom cell formatting (do not confuse with conditional formatting). Here is an example: In such cases you can use […]

Here is a quick excel tip to make your charts look professional by showing symbols in the axis labels instead of text. Just follow these 4 simple steps: First identify the symbols you want to show on the axis or as data label from symbol fonts like webdings, wingdings or a custom dingbat font like […]

Often we work with large data sheets and it becomes tedious if you want to compare data / formulas etc. You can try split (menu > window > split or alt+w+s) to break the sheet in to two. But there is another cool thing you can do, open a new window for the spreadsheet. Just […]