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
Changing text case in Google Sheets may seem an intricate task as there is no such option in the standard menu. Even so, the task is very much resolvable. In this blog post, I share different ways to capitalize your words or turn them into lowercase, uppercase, and sentence case. 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
This guide shows one more handy method of sending attachments in Outlook on the basis of Shared Email Templates. 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
Learn how to create drafts in Outlook and remove or restore them if necessary. Also, you’ll see the way to turn your drafts into templates to ease and hasten your Outlook correspondence. 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
Want to identify the highest or lowest values in a column or row? Need to return not only the values themselves but their names too? With this tutorial, you will learn how to find top 3, 5, 10 or n values in a dataset and retrieve matching data. Continue reading
Interested in changing the default font color to any of your favorites in an Outlook email as quickly as possible? Shared Email Templates can do the trick and this article will show how. Continue reading
When analyzing a set of numbers, it often makes sense to find the biggest ones. Getting the highest value is super-easy with the MAX function. When it comes to targeting a specific largest value, say the 2nd or the 3rd biggest number in a dataset, the LARGE function comes in handy. Continue reading
Trying to get a bottom value based on one or more conditions? Just use the SMALL function together with IF. This tutorial shows how to build such a formula and explains its internal logic, so that you could easily decipher the formula and adjust for your needs. Continue reading
Need to find a few lowest numbers in a worksheet? This is quite easy to do with the Excel Sort feature. Do not want to re-sort your data with every change? The SMALL function will help you quickly find the lowest value, second lowest, third lowest, and so on. Continue reading
Trying to build an IF statement with wildcard text, but it fails every time? The problem is not in your formula but in the function itself - Excel IF does not support wildcard characters. However, there is a way to get it to work for partial text match, and this tutorial will teach you how. Continue reading
When you are looking for something but not exactly sure exactly what, wildcards are a perfect solution. You can think of a wildcard as a joker that can take on any value. There are only 3 wildcard characters in Excel, but they can do so many useful things! Continue reading
Working on a report, investment plan or any other dataset with dates, you may often need to sum values within a specific period. This tutorial will teach you a quick and easy solution - SUMIFS formula with date range as criteria. Continue reading
Microsoft Excel has a special function to sum cells with multiple conditions and the AND logic - the SUMIFS function. In some situations, however, you may need to sum with multiple OR criteria. And this is when the SUMIF function comes in handy. Continue reading
Sometimes Excel worksheets can be difficult to read because of dense information and complex structure. Adding borders around cells can help you distinguish different sections, emphasize certain data, and make your worksheets better presentable and more attractive. Continue reading
In Excel 365, the XMATCH function was added to supersede the MATCH function. But before you start upgrading your existing formulas, it would be wise to understand all advantages of the new function and how it differs from the old one. Continue reading