Category: Formulas

Excel makes it easy to decipher why a formula produces its result. When you click on the cell, the formula is displayed in the formula bar. If that’s not enough, you can select the Formulas ribbon and click Evaluate Formulas for a step-by-step walkthrough. But what happens when you don’t…

The CONCATENATE function joins two or more text strings together into one string. For example, if you have the customer’s first name in Column A and the last name in Column B, you could use “=CONCATENATE(A3,“ ”,B3)” to produce a string containing first name and last name. Be aware that…

Have you ever copied a formula to another tab in your workbook, and the result was not at all what you expected? Moved a formula to a new location and were surprised that it didn’t change? References in Excel work just as you would expect in most situations; but to…

Have you ever needed to calculate a person’s age from a birthdate in Excel? Or find the number of years since the last audit? Excel includes two functions that perform well: YEARFRAC and DATEDIF. The YEARFRAC Function YEARFRAC gives the number of years between two dates. The FRAC is short…

You have created a report that shows your company’s sales by month. Your boss asks you to add a row that shows the change from the prior month. You need to subtract the prior month’s sales from the current month’s sales. Unfortunately, Excel doesn’t have a SUBTRACT formula. What do…

How do you find a single value in a table? How do you find, say, the number in the fifth column of the third row? Try out the Excel offset formula! The OFFSET function finds a cell (or range of cells) that is a specific number of cells away from…

As amazing as the IF formula is alone, it really comes into its own when used in groups. In our last post, we talked about how to apply discounts to customer quotes based on a set of criteria being met. This week we’ll introduce you to nested IF functions. Nested…