All articles with 'spreadsheets' Tag

Dear Readers & Friends, I am very happy to announce that Excel School online training program is now available for your consideration. Please read this short post to understand what you will get when you sign-up for this program and how you can join. What will you get when you join? Access to Private Member-only […]

With this post we are starting a new series on how to do basic accounting in Microsoft Excel. In this and next 5 posts, we will aim to setup Profit & Loss account reporting for multi-location retail company.

During this series we will learn how to make P&L reports on various criteria with just few clicks.

Many users find it difficult to manage their P&L reporting for Multi Location organization.

We will be using Pivot Tables for our reporting purpose and will take example of a Retails chain with multiple locations divided into various regions.

Okay, this is a cop-out, but I have been busy and not-in-a-mood-for-writing in the last 2 days. (I don’t know, but I feel a bit low, may be it is all the snow around and constant work due to excel school and day job).

So, let us have an open thread on Excel Shortcuts. I will start by listing down all the excel keyboard shortcuts I use regularly,

Here is a typical scenario: We want to allow only one of the pre-defined customer names in our spreadsheet. We have listed down all the customers in column B and want excel to check against this list and validate the data. But there are 3 problems. (1) Our list is not sorted alphabetically (2) It contains duplicates and (3) The list comes from external source, so we can not remove duplicates and sort the list every time.

Now how can we set up a simple data validation list that would not repeat customer names and shows them in sorted order like this.

Read the rest of this guest post by Hui to learn how to use data validation in creative new ways.

Sometimes we get values in our Excel sheets in such a way that the % sign is omitted. So instead of the value being 23%, it is 23. Now, you can very easily correct this by editing the cell and adding a % sign at the end. But what if you have 100s of rows of data. You can’t do this to every cell. (You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then). There must be some simple and intuitive solution for this … umm.

We, data junkies, love pivot tables. We think pivot tables are solution for everything (except for may be global warming and that broken espresso machine down stairs).

Today, we are going to learn 5 awesome pivot table tricks that will make you a star.

Blank rows or Blank cells is a problem we all inherit one time or another. This is very common when you try to import data from somewhere else (like a text file or a CSV file). Today we will learn a very simple trick to delete blank rows from excel spreadsheets. Read this post to findout how to delete blank rows / cells from your excel data in a snap.

Most of you already know that using the REPT formula along with pipe (“|”) symbol, we can make simple in-cell charts in excel. For eg. =REPT(“|”,10) looks like a bar chart of width 10. Despite the simplicity, most people don’t use in-cell charts because these charts don’t look anything like their counterparts. But you can […]

Today we will build a mortgage payment calculator (and amortization schedule) using excel. But we will not build a boring excel sheet, we will build a mortgage calculator that is easy to play with.

A mortgage payment is a monthly installment that you pay towards a loan. Any mortgage loan will typically have, (1) loan amount, (2) duration of the loan in years, (3) interest rate per year

Given these 3 parameters, we can easily determine the monthly installment amount (this will be the same amount for all months during loan tenure)

We are going to use Excel’s form controls (more on this below) to build a mortgage payment calculator like this.

Today we will learn to use Excel’s LEFT and FIND formulas. But what fun it is to learn a new formula on a Tuesday? So, we will actually learn to use these formulas to solve the problem: “extract the username from an email ID” How is an email ID structured? Any email ID contains 2 […]

Timeline charts are great for providing quick snapshots of historical events. And hardly a day goes by without some one making a cool visualization of a time line of this or that. Time lines are easy to read, present information in a logical manner and mostly fun.

So yesterday, I set out to mimic the iconic gadgets of all time in excel, just for fun. Then it strike me, why not make a visual time line of Microsoft Excel ? So I did that instead.

Do you know that you collapse or expand excel charts? Don’t believe me? Me neither. When I first realized that we can collapse / expand charts without writing any macros or lengthy formulas, I couldn’t wait to share it with all of you. This is such a simple yet powerful trick. See it for yourself.

The trick lies in using group / un-group data feature and carefully aligning charts with the cell grid. The whole process takes just about 2 minutes and produces wow factor worth a week. Go check it, now. Also, a downloadable template is included in the post.

So we are in 2010, dawn of a new decade. In fact everyday is a start of new decade, as my friend Jon reflects on twitter. So what are your plans for this year and decade? As for me, I haven’t really jotted down any new year resolutions. So I am using this post as […]

Jennie, a sweet and ambitious lady set out to do 101 things in the next 1001 days. She took the inspiration from Day Zero Project. Not stopping there, she prepared a cute little excel sheet to keep track of all these new year resolutions and sent it to me.

I think this is a swell excel template if you want to keep track of your goals or new year resolutions or just manage a list.

This is second part of 2 part series on conditionally formatting dates in excel.

Highlighting Repeat Customers using Conditional FormattingIn yesterday’s post we have learned how to conditionally format dates using excel. In this article, you will learn how to use these conditional formatting tricks to highlight repeat customers in a list of sales records.