Find cells containing specific text A customer called me today to ask a question about Excel. I thought it was an interesting challenge, so I’ll share it with you here. The customer has a list of part numbers and their components. When they select a component part number, they want to quickly find all parent part numbers that contain that component. The parent part number is in column A, and the component part number is in column B. Here’s an example: Notice that the parent p

I’ve written a couple of blogs lately about creating Excel macros. In a related topic, today I’m going to talk about one of the easiest and most intuitive ways of running your macro: a button. Before we get to that, though, let’s review some of the methods of running your macro. You can use any of the following methods: · The Macro dialog box (Press “Macro” on the “View” ribbon) · Shortcut keys, assigned when you create the macro · Customizing the ribb

Relative references vs absolute references in Microsoft Excel macros

When getting started with the Excel macro recorder, start small, and build on your successes.

Last week I discussed using Excel effectively, in order to ensure it best serves your small business. I’m going to expand on that today, giving you some ideas about how you can use Excel features to validate the data that is being entered into your Excel sheet. Are you capturing data in Excel, but finding that the quality of that data isn’t great? Maybe someone types in their name in the phone number field, or they type a date in a field where you’re expecting a dollar amount

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

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

Just about all companies rely on electronic data these days, but not all companies can quickly and easily access their data. Here are a few of the common mistakes that I see frequently. Some companies keep their data in text documents, overwriting the existing data each time something changes. This is fast and convenient, but doesn’t allow you to view historical information. What if the customer says that you previously offered them a lower price – can you prove that, or do y

If you’ve ever written VBA code in Excel, Access, or any of the other products in the Microsoft Office suite, you may already be familiar with Option Explicit. If you’re not, it'll be worth a few minutes of your time to learn about it. It’s a useful tool that will save you a lot of headaches. In order to understand the Option Explicit statement, you need to start by understanding that Visual Basic allows implicit variable declaration by default. This means that you are not re

How to add line numbers to VBA

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