'Excel Tips and How-to' category archive
How to find and remove duplicate cells in Excel
Is duplicate data in your worksheets causing you a headache? This tutorial will teach you how to quickly find, select, color or delete duplicate cells. Continue reading
Spilling in Excel: what it means and how to use it
The recent dynamic array update has bought a wealth of inspiring new capabilities. But all is centered around the core concept of "spilling". So, let's take a close look at this feature and how you can leverage it to improve your Excel experience. Continue reading
How to remove duplicates in Excel cell
When it concerns removing duplicate cells or rows, Microsoft Excel offers a number of different options. But when it comes to removing duplicate text within a given cell, Excel provides… nothing. Well, if there is no inbuilt function we need, let's go write our own one. Continue reading
Excel spill range explained
Spilling is one of the new features introduced in Excel 365 as part of the dynamic arrays functionality. Understanding the spill range concept is the focus of this tutorial. Continue reading
Implicit intersection and @ operator in Excel 365 and older versions
You have the feeling you know everything about your Excel workbooks, and then a @ character appears from nowhere in the beginning of your formulas. What does this mean? And how does it work precisely? Continue reading
Excel #SPILL! error - causes and fixes
Just imagine this: you upgraded to Microsoft Office 365 with the latest Excel updates and for some reason the tried and tested formulas you've been using for years have suddenly stopped working. Whatever you do, you are now getting a #SPILL error. Does anyone know what it means? Continue reading
Excel: prevent text from spilling over into next cells
When entering a long text in a cell, you may notice that sometimes it spills out into adjacent columns and at times gets hidden behind the neighboring cells. How does Excel determine what to do and how do you stop words from overflowing into next cells? Continue reading
Using NPER function in Excel with formula examples
When building corporate funds, financial analysts often wish to know how long it will take to reach the desired corpus. When applying for a loan, you may want to find out how many payments are required to repay it in full. For such tasks, Excel provides the NPER function. Continue reading
How to use PV function in Excel to calculate present value
Weather you are thinking about buying an insurance annuity or putting some money in a saving account, you are wondering - is that a good deal? To know it for sure, you need to find the present value of an investment. For this, Microsoft Excel provides the PV function. Continue reading
How to calculate present value of annuity in Excel: formula and calculator
If offered a choice to receive a certain sum of money right now or defer the payment into the future, which would you choose? For most of us, taking money now is a natural instinct. In the financial world, this is explained by the time value of money concept. Continue reading
How to make and use Excel data entry form
When it comes to inputting information in Excel spreadsheets, most people do it the traditional way - cell by cell, row by row. To make the process more use-friendly and less time-consuming, you can use a special data entry form. Continue reading
Using LET function in Excel with formula examples
If you work with lengthy formulas in Excel, then you are certainly familiar with the idea of named ranges that make complex formulas easier to read. And now, Microsoft is making a step further and allows assigning names to calculations and values directly in a formula. Continue reading
How to find and fix broken links in Excel
Excel cells may often link to other workbooks to pull relevant information from there. When a source workbook gets deleted, relocated, or damaged, external references to that file break down and your formulas start returning errors. Obviously, to fix the formulas, you need to find broken links. Continue reading
How to find and remove external links in Excel
External links, or external references, are a very common practice in Excel. After completing a particular task, however, you may want to find and probably break those links. Continue reading
Set up dependent drop-down list for multiple rows in Excel
The introduction of dynamic arrays has made our lives as Excel users a lot easier. Among many other things, they significantly simplify the creation of dynamic drop down lists that you can copy across multiple rows. Continue reading
Excel FV function to calculate future value
Building your personal and corporate finances requires thorough planning. One of the most important factors of success is understanding how much an investment made today will grow to in the future. That is called the future value of investment, and this tutorial will teach you how to calculate it in Excel. Continue reading
5 ways to do VLOOKUP in Excel - which is fastest?
If your tables have only a few dozen rows, then most likely any method will be fast enough, and you won't notice the difference. But if the number of rows in your tables is measured in thousands, the correct choice of the function is crucial - the difference in performance can be more than 10 times! Continue reading
Excel RATE function: formula examples to calculate interest rate
Financial decisions are important part of business strategy and planning. In everyday life, we also have quite a lot of financial decisions to make. For such scenarios, Excel provides the RATE function that will help you calculate an interest rate for a specific period. Continue reading
LARGE IF formula in Excel: find highest values with criteria
While working with numeric data in Excel, you may often need to get the highest numbers based on criteria. The bad news is that the LARGEIF function does not exist in Excel. The good news is that you can easily construct your own LARGE IF formula. Continue reading
How to highlight top or bottom 3, 5, 10 values in Excel
In case you want to bring focus to the highest or lowest N values in a dataset, the best way is to highlight them in different colors. This article will teach you how to do this with Excel's presets and create your own conditional formatting rule based on formula. Continue reading
