When looking up some information in Excel, it's a rare case when all the data is on the same sheet. More often, you will have to search across multiple sheets or even different workbooks. The good news is that Microsoft Excel provides more than one way to do this. Continue reading
When analyzing large chunks of information in Excel, you may often want to know how many cells contain specific text. This tutorial explains how to do it in a simple way. Continue reading
Initially, Excel spreadsheets were designed to work with numbers. But these days we often use them to store and manipulate text too. Want to know how many cells with text there are in your worksheet? Microsoft Excel has several functions for this. Continue reading
When searching for something in your Excel spreadsheets, most of the time you'd look up vertically in columns or horizontally in rows. But sometimes you need to look across both rows and columns. This is called a two-dimensional lookup, and this tutorial shows how to do it in 4 different ways. Continue reading
Although Microsoft Excel has special functions for vertical and horizontal lookup, expert users normally replace them with INDEX MATCH, which is superior to VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP in many ways. Among other things, it can look up two or more criteria in columns and rows. Continue reading
The tutorial introduces XLOOKUP - the new function for vertical and horizontal lookup in Excel. Left lookup, last match, Vlookup with multiple criteria and a lot more things that used to require a rocket science degree to accomplish have now become as easy as ABC. Continue reading
When it comes to finding the minimum based on conditions, there are several possible solutions. You’ll see different approaches to locate the lowest value and choose the one that suits best for you. Continue reading
If you have a large range of data to find the lowest value in, the scrolling and looking for it manually is not an option. Please check different ways of locating a minimum number in Excel and choose the best one for your task. Continue reading
Almost every Excel user is familiar with the good old MAX function that is designed to return the largest value in a dataset. In some situations, however, you may need to drill down into your data further to find the max value based on certain criteria. Continue reading
Traditionally, when you needed to find the highest value with conditions in Excel, you had to build your own MAX IF formula. While not a big deal for experienced users, that might present certain difficulties for novices. Luckily, Microsoft has recently introduced a new function that lets us do conditional max an easy way! Continue reading
MAX is one of the most straightforward and easy-to-use Excel functions. However, it does have a couple of tricks knowing which will give you a big advantage. Continue reading
For many years, finance experts and textbooks have warned about the flaws and deficiencies of the internal rate of return, but many executives keep using it for assessing capital projects. Do they enjoy living on the edge or simply are not aware of the existence of MIRR? Continue reading
Calculating IRR for periodic cash flows is easy. In real life situations, however, cash inflows and outflows often happen at irregular intervals. Thankfully, Microsoft Excel has a special function to find IRR in such cases, and this tutorial will teach you how to use it. Continue reading
IRR in Excel is one of the financial functions for calculating the internal rate of return, which is frequently used in capital budgeting to judge projected returns on investments. Continue reading
Microsoft Excel has a special function for calculating NPV, but its use can be tricky especially if you have little experience in financial modeling. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how the Excel NPV function works and point out possible pitfalls when calculating the net present value of a series of cash flows. Continue reading
In Microsoft Excel, there are 6 different functions for calculating variance but all of them are designed to find variance in the classical sense, i.e. how far a set of values are spread out from their average. In this article, you will learn how to calculate percentage variance between two cells. Continue reading
Variance is one of the most useful tools in probability theory and statistics. In science, it describes how far each number in the data set is from the mean. In practice, it often shows how much something changes. In this article, we will analyze different methods of calculating variance in Excel. Continue reading
The tutorial shows how to make an amortization schedule in Excel to detail periodic payments on an amortizing loan or mortgage, including an amortization schedule with extra payments and a variable number of periods. Continue reading
When you make periodic payments on a loan or mortgage, a certain part of each payment goes towards the interest and the remainder is applied to the loan principal. In this tutorial, we will look at how to use the PPMT function to calculate the principal portion of the payment. Continue reading
Before you borrow money it's good to know how a loan works. Thanks to the Excel financial functions such as PMT, PPMT and IPMT, computing periodic payments for a loan is easy. In this tutorial, we will have a closer look at the PMT function. Continue reading
In statistics, there exist many different forecasting techniques and some of these techniques are already implemented in Excel. This tutorial will teach you how to forecast in Excel based on historical data and may help you save money on specialized forecasting software. Continue reading
Flash Fill is one of the most amazing features of Excel. It grabs a tedious task that would take hours to be performed manually and executes it automatically in a flash. Continue reading
As simple as it seems, Excel cell reference confuses many users. How is a cell address defined in Excel? What is an absolute and relative reference and when each should be used? In this tutorial, you will find answers to these and many more questions. Continue reading
One of the most useful features of Excel tables are structured references. When you have just stumbled upon a special syntax for referencing tables, it may look boring and confusing, but after experimenting a bit you will surely see how useful and cool this feature is. Continue reading
When doing correlation analysis in Excel, in most cases you will deal with the Pearson correlation. But when the underlying assumptions of the Pearson correlation (continuous variables, linearity, and normality) are not met, you can do the Spearman rank correlation instead of Pearson's. Continue reading
Empty cells are not bad if you are intentionally leaving them in right places for aesthetic reasons. But blank cells in wrong places are certainly undesirable. Luckily, there is a relatively easy way to remove blanks in Excel. Continue reading
The prospect of reviewing all the columns in your worksheet and removing the empty ones manually is definitely something you'd want to avoid. Luckily, Microsoft Excel provides a great lot of different features, and by using those features in creative ways you can cope with almost any task. Continue reading
IF is one of the most popular Excel functions and very useful on its own. Combined with the logical functions such as AND, OR, and NOT, the IF function has even more value because it allows you to test multiple conditions in desired combinations. Continue reading
Subtraction is one of the four basic arithmetic operations, and every primary school pupil knows that to subtract one number from another you use the minus sign. This good old method also works for subtracting numbers and cells in Excel. Continue reading
Some Excel users prefer organizing data vertically in columns while others choose horizontal arrangement in rows. In situations when you need to quickly change the orientation of a given range, TRANSPOSE is the function to use. Continue reading
