Eight ways to exploit COUNTIF() … and sumif() too [spreadcheats]
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 […]
Excel Formula for Finding Repeated Words in a Cell
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 […]
Extracting Unique, Duplicate and Missing Items using Formulas [spreadcheats]
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 […]
Sorting Text in Excel using Formulas
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 […]
Clean up Incorrectly Formatted Phone Numbers using Excel
In our Utopian imaginations all the data would have been standardized and shareable across systems and people. But alas, the reality is totally different. We seldom get data in the format / way we desire it to be. In other words, the ingredients are all there, but for us to prepare the dinner, you must […]
Handling spelling mistakes while searching your data using excel
Spelling mistakes are a thing of day to day carporate life. Most of the data in spreadsheets is entered by people and hence prone to having spelling mistakes or alternate spellings. For eg. a person named John could have been spelled as Jon. And when John calls you back to confirm his reservation and you […]
Sorting a list of items in random order in excel – using formulas
In shuffling a list of items in excel I have described the technique of using random numbers generated by RAND() to sort a list of items. The technique had one disadvantage though, every time you need to reshuffle the list you have to press F9 to recalculate the rand() and then go to menu > […]