Excel tips and tutorials
If you download bank statement data into Excel, or copy numbers from a website, those numbers might not add up correctly. The bank data might look like numbers, but Excel might see those numbers as text — not real numbers.
You can fix the numbers manually, as shown in the video below, or use a macro to automate the fix.
Continue reading “How to Fix Excel Numbers That Don’t Add Up”
In this week’s roundup, Data Insights Summit, status bar messages, choose a chart, and much more.
If a macro takes a long time to run, it can be frustrating to wait for it to finish. Usually the screen updating is turned off when a macro runs, so it’s hard to tell if anything is happening. Maybe it stopped, and you’ll be sitting here for the rest of the day, blissfully unaware of the problem.
To help you stay informed, you can show messages in the status bar, to let you know what progress is being made. It sounds like a technical challenge, but it’s easy to do.
In this week’s roundup, generate random numbers, work with big data, build floating forms, get fancy with chart labels, and more.
In the olden days (Excel 2003 and earlier), there were toolbars, and you could “float” those, and position them anywhere over the worksheet. You could also create custom toolbars, and add a few commands and macros to those. They could be moved around the worksheet too.
In the newer versions of Excel, those floating toolbars aren’t available, but you can create something similar, based on a UserForm. Build your own, or download my example, and customize it.
In this week’s roundup, number formatting trick, pivot chart layout, spreadsheet comedy, and much more.
Recently, someone asked me why all the columns in their pivot chart were the same colour. The chart showed several months of data, for multiple regions, and every column was blue.
In the screen shot below, I’ve created a similar pivot chart, from fake sales data.
Welcome back, and I hope you enjoyed your holiday break! It’s taking most of my brain power to type 2016, instead of 2015, so this will be a short roundup, to get things rolling again. If you subscribe to my newsletter, the next issue will be sent on January 12, 2016.
It’s only a week until Christmas Eve, and to help you celebrate the holidays, I have updated my Scroll Bar Christmas tree. No macros are needed, but this version uses customizable icon sets that are available in Excel 2010 and later versions.
This will be my last blog post until the new year, so happy holidays, and remember to cell-ebrate safely!
In this week’s roundup, bad dashboards, new Workday function, calculation speed and much more.