In this week’s roundup, create a seating plan, do case sensitive lookups, learn Excel from Joel Spolsky, and more.
1. 7 Ways to Sum
Last week, I my blog post had a video that shows 7 ways to sum in Excel. The quickest way to get a total is with the AutoSum button – just select the amounts, and a blank cell, then click the button.
In the blog post, you can also see screenshots from Excel 3.0, and see how we did things in the old days (1990). Were you even using a computer, way back then?
Here is a short version of the 7 Ways to Sum video, and the full version is at the end of this article.
2. Case Sensitive Lookups
Usually it doesn’t matter if text is upper or lower case, when you’re doing a lookup in Excel. But, if you have to do a case-sensitive lookup, Chandoo show how to use EXACT, with other functions.
And be sure to read the story about Chandoo, and his Excel journey, on the PC Mag website.
3. Seating Plan
On the Tekhnologic blog, a classroom seating plan uses a drop down list of names with a little twist. In addition to the standard list of names, there is a random name at the top, and an option for leaving an empty seat
4. Date Calculations
Mike Alexander shared his list of 130 date calculations — more that you’ll ever need! For example, find the date of next week’s Tuesday, or the last Friday of the current month.
5. Learn Excel from Joel Spolsky
I’ve read many of Joel Spolsky’s articles, but this “You Suck at Excel” video is the first time that I’ve seen him teaching Excel tips. His goal is to teach his team members the “bare minimum of non-incompetence”. He was a program manager on Microsoft’s Excel team from 1991-1994, and led their VBA strategy.
6. Excel Humour
Finally, for a bit of spreadsheet humour, you can see what people are saying about Excel, in my weekly collection of tweets. Here’s one of my favourite tweets from this week’s collection.
Video: 7 Ways to Sum (Full Version)
Here’s the full video from my recent blog post, showing 7 different ways you can sum amounts in Excel. I’m sure you can think of other ways too, and there are more examples on the How to Sum in Excel page on my Contextures site.
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