I’ve worked with “garbage” data many times in Excel. You know what I mean – data that is so messy it takes you hours (or days) to clean it up. This week though, I did a different type of garbage tracking. Maybe I went a little overboard, but you’ve probably done that too, right? Anyway, here’s how I spent way too much time on an Excel project, but had fun doing it. Don’t judge!
Show Specific Sheets in Excel
In a workbook with lots of worksheets, it can be hard to find the ones that you need, to get a specific task done. Instead of scrolling through all the sheet tabs, or using the popup list of worksheets, use a drop down list to show just a few specific sheets in Excel. You’ll be able to focus on what you need to do, and ignore everything else.
Numbers Change to Dates in Excel
Have you ever copied football scores, such as 3-2, and pasted them into Excel, where they magically change to dates? It’s certainly annoying when a nice list of numbers change to dates in Excel, but fortunately there’s an easy way to prevent that from happening.
How to Change Excel Right-Click Menus
If you use the mouse most of the time, when you’re working in Excel, you probably right-click, to see the popup menus. For example, right-click a column heading to insert a new column. If your favourite commands aren’t on those popup menus, here’s how you can change Excel right-click menus, to add them. Also, if you have a minute, please take the 3-question Excel survey on my Debra D blog. Thanks!
Excel Lookup With Two Criteria
If you need to get a product price in Excel, you can use VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH to get the price from a lookup table, based on a product code. But what if you have two pieces of information, such as a product name, and a size, and you want to find the price based on that information? How can you do an Excel lookup with two criteria?
Macro to List All Pivot Fields and Pivot Items
If you’re setting up a big pivot table, it’s easy to lose track of what you’ve added, and what filters have been applied. To help you stay organized, I’ve created a macro to list all pivot fields and pivot items in the selected pivot table’s row, column and filter areas. You can download the sample file, and test the macro in your own files.
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How to Create a Pivot Table Style
You don’t have to stick with the default formats for your pivot tables. You can create a pivot table style with your own colours, and other formatting options that you like. Here’s how to get started, and a video with a simple formatting change that you can make.
Macro to Remove Pivot Table Calculated Fields
Have you ever recorded a macro to remove pivot table calculated fields? Just turn on the recorder, right-click on the field and hide it, and turn off the recorder. Then, if you try to run that macro later, Kaboom! You get an error message, “Run-time error ‘1004’: Unable to set the Orientation property of the PivotField class”.
Good news – you can download my sample file that has a macro that actually removes those pesky calculated fields, without creating an error message. The video shows how it works.
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Enter Complex Excel Formulas Fast
On Chandoo’s blog, Hui is running a series of articles with Excel Tips. There were some great tips in this week’s list, but my favourite one was down in the comments section – how to enter complex Excel formulas fast.
I’ve been using Excel for a long time, and I’ve never seen this suggestion before. And it’s a real time saver!
Free Excel Dashboard Tools
Mike Alexander, from the Bacon Bits Excel blog, has just released a major update to his Dashboard Tools add-in. And the great news is that you can get a free copy for the next few days! Mike is making this available until May 7th, at midnight (Central Time Zone).