Ideas for maximizing your use of Microsoft Excel

Excel is a great tool for helping you stay organized, and many people create checklists in Excel for just that purpose. I’ve got a packing checklist, for example, so that when I go on vacation, I don’t forget any important items. From a business perspective, I have a client in the construction industry, and they use a check list to ensure that key tasks are performed when a job is complete. Their checklist looks something like this: To make life a little easier for them, I wi

There’s a cool feature in PowerPoint that allows you to see all of your slides in sequence, move them around, and double-click to edit them. I don’t know what it’s called, but it usually appears at the left side of your screen in PowerPoint, like this: On a recent Excel project, my client had an idea to implement a similar feature in their Excel workbook. In this case, the user is sometimes working with dozens, or even hundreds, of Excel worksheets in a single workbook. To ma

Adding a Watermark to an Excel document only when printing

A brief introduction to Pivot Tables, explaining what they are and why you might want to use them.

Using a scaffolding technique to build complex formulas in Excel

I am the first to admit that when it comes to Excel, I don’t know it all. Hard to believe, I know (LOL!!) I’ve had students who don’t seem to believe that. Like any good instructor, I can appear to walk on water from time to time. It’s all illusion, though, trust me. There’s a quote I’ve always liked: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Sir Arthur C. Clarke That’s why I sometimes seem magical to my students. I’m using the sufficiently advan

Excel is a great tool for data analysis, with a powerful suite of built-in functions to help. You’re probably already familiar with some of the most common features, like SUM, AVERAGE and VLOOKUP. Here are three that you may not have heard of, but that are likely to help with your Excel projects. 1. DAYS The first function is DAYS. This function calculates the number of days between two dates. Here’s an example of when this might come in handy: In this example, I am calculati

Excel has some amazing report tools including charts and pivot tables. These tools are quick and easy to use, and produce some spectacular reports. However, if your data is not structured cleanly, these tools will stumble. When clients ask us to create reports on their Excel data, the first (and often, longest) task is to clean up the data so that it’s in a consistent state for reporting. Since Excel is not a database tool, it allows you to enter your data in a way that may b

Excel or Access? Microsoft has lots of great tools, and in most cases, it’s pretty clear which you need to use. If you need to write a letter, Word is your tool. If you need to create a slideshow, that’s PowerPoint. But often there’s confusion about Excel and Access. Since both can be used as database tools, which is best? The answer is: it depends. If you’re asking the question, you are probably already familiar with Excel, and you’ve probably already come across some of the

If you've ever thought about creating macros in Excel, you've probably heard the term "VBA". In this post, I'm going to give you a little background on VBA so that you can decide if it's something you want to tackle. Excel is a great tool for analyzing and presenting your data. But if you're like most people, you spend more time than you'd like performing repetitive tasks. Maybe you need to import data from your database once a month, sort it, and format it, for example. Macr