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

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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

In previous blogs, I’ve talked about Excel’s VLOOKUP function. In one, I covered the purpose of VLOOKUP, and in the other, I explained the difference between VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP. Today, let’s take a look at the arguments of the VLOOKUP function. I’ve never been happy with the way Microsoft explains them in the Insert Function dialog box – I find their terminology confusing. In this blog, I’m going to try to clarify these arguments for you. Let me start by showing you what the

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

In my last post, I talked about why you might use the VLOOKUP feature. If you missed it, you can find it here. Today, I’m going to discuss the difference between VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP. The two features are nearly identical. The difference between the two is in the orientation of your lookup data. Let me explain. VLOOKUP stands for Vertical look-up. It works great when your look-up data is oriented vertically. Take a look at this example: Notice that the names go down column A,

VLOOKUP is one of the coolest features of Microsoft Excel, and also one of the least understood. Lots of people are interested in it and have great cases for using it. But I get many people who tell me that they don't use it because they don't really understand how it works. Is it magic? YES! Well, sort of. OK, no. But still, it's one of the coolest features of Excel, and well worth understanding. In a nutshell, VLOOKUP is a database feature. Now, mind you, I don't recommend

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