When importing data to Excel from somewhere else, a whole lot of special characters may appear in your worksheets. Even more frustrating is that some characters are invisible, which produces extra white space before, after or inside text strings. Continue reading
In the recent couple of articles, we've looked at different ways to remove characters from strings in Excel. Today, we'll investigate one more use case - how to delete everything before or after a specific character. Continue reading
When working with unstructured text data, you often need to parse it to retrieve relevant information. This article will teach you a few simple ways to remove any number of characters from the left or right side of a text string. Continue reading
Imagine this: you receive raw data for analysis and find out that numbers are mixed with text in one column. In most cases, it will certainly be more convenient to have them in separate columns for closer examination. Continue reading
By default, Excel tables are equipped with a number of great features including predefined table styles. In some situations, however, you may want to remove formatting keeping all other functionality of a table. This tutorial will teach you how to quickly do that. Continue reading
Excel Conditional Formatting makes it possible to highlight duplicates in every possible way you can think of. But, as usual, there is a "but" - conditional formatting rules work on a cell level while you may want to highlight duplicate text rather than entire cells. This can only be done with macros. Continue reading
How do people usually search in Excel? Mostly, by using the Find & Replace tool, which works just fine for single values. But what if you have tens or even hundreds of items to replace? Luckily, there are a few more effective methods to perform mass replace in Excel, and we are going to look at each of them in detail. Continue reading
With the introduction of the LAMBDA function, recursive computations in Excel have become available to anyone, not just VBA programmers. To put it simply, you can now construct formulas that behave like a programming language and allow you to achieve so much, with so little, so fast :) Continue reading
Until recently, user-defined functions were the prerogative of programmers. The introduction of the LAMBDA function has made them available for everyone. With this wonderful addition to Excel's toolbox, we no longer need VBA skills to create our own custom functions. Continue reading
It is sad enough when a brand-new feature refuses to work in your Excel. But even more frustrating is when a good old thing stops working all of a sudden, and you are receiving an error for a formula that worked perfectly for years. This tutorial will teach you how to fix a #SPILL error in some popular formulas. Continue reading
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
