Category: Excel®
Visually Display Composite Data — How to Create an Excel Waterfall Chart
Have you ever needed to present a chart that displays component data that roll up to a total? If all of the values are positive, Excel’s stacked column chart works beautifully; but it breaks down when your data includes both positive and negative values. The answer is an Excel waterfall…
Read More
Ease the Pain of Data Entry with an Excel Forms Template
Excel makes it easy to work with data tables, but first you must get that data into tables. Keying data into a spreadsheet and moving the cursor after each entry can be frustrating at best; at worst, it can leave you with mangled data in an unusable format. Fortunately, Excel…
Read More
Excel Formulas Not Calculating? How to Fix it Fast
You’ve created the reports for your management meeting, and, just before you print copies for the executives, you discover that the totals are all showing last month’s values. How do you fix it—fast? 1. Check for Automatic Recalculation On the Formulas ribbon, look to the far right and click Calculation…
Read More
What is the Excel Concatenate Function and How Does It Work?
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…
Read More
Excel Formula References: Why Copying Formulas Sometimes Goes Wrong
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…
Read More
How to Create Shortcuts in Excel by Adding an Excel Macro Button
If you’ve ever repeated the same actions multiple times in a spreadsheet, you’ll benefit from recording a macro to automate those tasks. But, once you have a macro, how do you access it? The easiest way is to add a macro button to your spreadsheet, for which Excel offers three…
Read More
How to Use Excel Chart Templates
How often do you need to insert a favorite chart style, consistent with your prior submission, to maintain a consistent look and feel to your monthly reporting packages? That consistency is one element that increases the appearance of professionalism—especially if it reflects your company’s brand, typography, and color scheme. The…
Read More
Using the Age Formula in Excel to Calculate Age
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…
Read More
Learn How to Subtract in Excel with the Subtract Formula
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…
Read More
3 Ways to Copy a Formula Down a Column
One of the more tedious tasks in Excel is to copy a formula down an entire column of a report. Not only is it mind-numbing, but it also leaves the opportunity for error if you don’t copy the formula down to exactly the correct cells. For best results, try one…
Read More