Until recently, there were two prevalent methods to merge cell contents in Excel: the concatenation operator and CONCATENATE function. With the introduction of TEXTJOIN, it seems like a more powerful alternative has appeared, which enables you to join text in a more flexible manner including any delimiter in between. Continue reading
In some situations, you may want to know how many cells do not have anything in them. This tutorial will show you the fastest and most convenient methods to get the number of empty cells in a range as well as totally blank rows. Continue reading
In a small dataset, you can easily spot all the blanks with your own eyes. But in a huge file containing hundreds of rows, pinpointing empty cells manually is next to impossible. This tutorial will teach you four quick and easy ways to highlight blank cells in Excel so that you can visually recognize them. Continue reading
There are many situations when you need to check if a cell is empty or not. For instance, if cell is blank, then you might want to sum, count, copy a value from another cell, or do nothing. In these scenarios, ISBLANK is the right function to use. Continue reading
Whenever you need to get information about the contents of some cell in Excel, you'd typically use the so-called Information functions. Both ISTEXT and ISNONTEXT belong to this category. The ISTEXT function checks if a value is text and ISNONTEXT tests if a value is not text. Continue reading
The concept of the ISNUMBER function in Excel is very simple - it just checks whether a given value is a number or not. But the practical uses of the function go far beyond its basic concept, especially when combined with other functions within larger formulas. Continue reading
In most Office applications, starting a new paragraph is not a problem - you simply press Enter on your keyboard. In Microsoft Excel, however, this work differently - pressing the Enter key completes the entry and moves the cursor to the next cell. So, how do you create a new line in Excel? Continue reading
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
