All articles with 'quick tip' Tag

Here is a quick Excel tip to kick start your week.

Sometimes, we want to enter same data in to several cells. You can use CTRL+Enter to do this in a snap.

(1) Select all the cells where you want to enter the same data.
(2) Type the data
(3) Press CTRL+Enter
(4) Done!

See the animation aside to understand how this works.

I have 2 quick announcements & 1 Excel tip for you.

Announcements

• Registrations for next batch of VBA Class start form January 11th (Wednesday). Please click here to download the course brochure.
• 20% Holiday discount on Excel School expires tonight (Midnight, Pacific Time). Please visit Excel School page and use the code LETSGOEXCEL to claim your discount.

Read on for a bonus Excel tip as well.

Today, while answering a reader’s email, I wrote this VBA code, If Target.Value = “yes” Then ‘do something End If But I realized that my code would run only the Target cell has “yes” in it. It wont run if the target cell has “YES”, or “Yes” or “YeS”. This is because by default, all […]

So how did your weekend go?

I did a bit of gardening, painted our car shed, played badminton (I am learning), attended 60th birthday of a close friend’s dad. Pretty hectic, but fun as usual.

To start this week, let me share a simple but fun way to add data to charts.

Lets say you have a chart that depicts Annual sales for last few years. And you want to add the data of Profits (or Expenses) to this chart. Here is a dead-simple way to do it.

1. Copy the profit data by selecting it and pressing CTRL+C
2. Select the chart
3. Paste by pressing CTRL+V
4. That is all!

This post is authored by Martin, one of our readers.

Situation:

Sometimes I encounter data in my tables with blank cells where there is a repeated value from the cell directly above. See below:

This can be annoying when it comes to interpreting the data and when sorting columns.

Solution:

To know how I solve this, just read rest of the article.

Filtering is a simple yet powerful way to analyze data. When you apply filters to any list of values, Excel gives you some really useful pre-defined filters so that you can analyze the data in a variety of ways. So, assuming you have data like this: We all know how to filter data for Bananas. […]

Pivot Tables are an integral part of Excel based reports. So it is no surprise that many of create multiple pivot reports in one Excel workbook. So when the underlying data changes, we often spend time refreshing individual pivot tables. Today, I want to share a quick tip about how to refresh all pivot tables […]

Everyone and their colleague knows the importance of Excel keyboard shortcuts. While it may be a good idea to know a 97 different shortcuts for everything in Excel, the fact is, you don’t use them all the time. So, it all boils down to memorizing the few shortcuts that you use all the time.

In this post, I am sharing 10 such shortcuts that I can’t live without, especially, when I am analyzing data, making charts and formatting my workbooks.

During one my recent training programs, a participant asked an interesting question.

I have a list of values. I would like to place a hyperlink in my workbook that would always take me to the last value in the list.

Something like shown aside.

Click on the image to learn how this is done.

With Excel 2007, Microsoft has introduced a powerful and useful feature called as Tables. One of the advantages of Tables is that you can write legible formulas by using structural references. That means, you can write easy to understand formulas like this,

But, there is a problem. When you write these formula and drag the formula cell sideways to fill remaining cells, Excel changes table column references and thus makes your formulas almost useless.

Well, there is a simple workaround for this problem

Today, we will take a detour to world-wide web and learn how we can improve our dashboards, reports, presentations or workbooks by using one of the ideas, called as Golden Triangle.

Today we will learn about Pivot Table Report Filters.

We all know that Pivot Tables help us analyze and report massive amount of data in little time. Excel has several useful pivot table features to help us make all sorts of reports and charts.

Report Filters are one such thing.

For most of us, the prospect of inheriting a large, undisclosed sum of money is bleak. But we have high probability of inheriting a complex Excel workbook with 19 worksheets and 2300 rows of data and 195 formulas. The kind where entire rainbow colors are used to color code accounts receivable statuses. Then what do we do? We spend a whole afternoon (and then the rest of the month) breaking our head trying to figure out why the total revenues are only $ 41.2 million when profits are $ 99.23 million.

So how do we deal with our inheritance?

Here is a quick tip to help you get started. Disable “Direct editing mode“.

Here is a quick tip on removing data validation rules. We all know that data validation is a powerful feature in Excel to control what data is entered. But, sometimes, you may want to remove the rules from a set of cells. How would you do it? The normal approach is, Select the cells with […]

Lets say you have some data in 2 columns and you want to compare row by row to spot the differences. Of course you can write a formula or apply conditional formatting. But there is a quick and dirty solution that works just as fine.