In some situations, you may need to sum specific numbers in a range, say top 3, 5, 10 or n. That might be a challenge because Excel has no inbuilt function for this. But as always, there is nothing that would prevent you from constructing your own formulas :) Continue reading
When building complex formulas in Excel, you may sometimes need to get a column letter of a specific cell or from a given number. This can be done in two ways: by using inbuilt functions or your own one. Continue reading
VLOOKUP is one of the most confusing Excel functions plagued with many issues. Using VLOOKUP with ISERROR can help you catch all possible errors and handle them in a way most appropriate to your situation. Continue reading
Getting a lot of #N/A errors in your worksheets and are curious to know if there is a way to replace them with a user-friendly message? IFNA formula is the solution you need. Continue reading
The tutorial talks about how to return a column number in Excel using formulas and how to number columns automatically. Continue reading
When Excel cannot find what it is asked for, a #N/A! error appears in a cell. To intercept and handle such errors, you can use the ISNA function. Continue reading
Traditionally, string concatenation in Excel is done with the help of the CONCATENATE function or the ampersand symbol. In modern Excel, these old-school methods give way to CONCAT - a newer and improved function to combine text from multiple cells into one cell. Continue reading
When working with text data in Excel, you may sometimes need to add the same text to existing cells to make things clearer. For example, you might want to put some prefix at the beginning of each cell, insert a special symbol at the end, or place certain text before a formula. Continue reading
In this tutorial, we will look at the most common cases of removing characters in Excel. Want to delete specific text from multiple cells? Or maybe strip the first or last character in a string? Or perhaps remove only a specific occurrence of a given character? Whatever your task is, you will find more than one solution for it! Continue reading
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
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
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
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
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