Excel tips and tutorials
If you’re analyzing sales data from year to year, you can make a line chart that shows each month’s sales. That lets you see if there were any months with big differences, and shows how sales went up and down over the year. Another option is to use a Running Total to compare years in Excel. It’s quick and easy to set up with a pivot table and pivot chart.
Continue reading “Use Running Total to Compare Years in Excel”
Do you need a quick way to show different data in a worksheet? For example, on an order form, you could let people select a region, and automatically include the shipping cost or tax rate for the selected region. I added an English/French selector to a workbook last week, so a formula would work correctly, in either language.
In a big Excel file, it’s handy to have hyperlinks that take you from one sheet to another. Maybe you need a table of contents, or a single link on a summary sheet that takes you to a data entry sheet. You can use the Insert Hyperlink command on the Ribbon, but it’s even quicker to create an Excel hyperlink with drag and drop. Here are a couple of ways to do that.
And there are a couple of Excel announcements too.
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It’s pivot table time! First, we’ll take a look two common problems with time values in pivot tables. Then I’ll show you a couple of ways to save time when working with pivot tables.
In most cases, it’s best if you keep people away from your data in Excel. It’s too easy to mess things up! Instead, set up a worksheet where they can use Slicers to set filter criteria in Excel.
Then click a button, and a macro dumps the data onto the worksheet. In the screen shot below, you can see how it works – easy, quick, and safe!
Continue reading “Use Slicers to Set Filter Criteria in Excel”
Did you win the big prize? Have you ever picked those winning numbers? If you’re keeping track of lottery ticket numbers, use Excel conditional formatting to highlight the winning numbers in a list. Each week, enter the numbers from the latest draw, and Excel will colour all the cells that have matching numbers. You can use a different colour to highlight the latest lottery number matches. The screen shot below shows an example.
Continue reading “Highlight the Latest Lottery Number Matches”
In this week’s roundup, Data Analysis, Power BI, combining functions, and more Excel tips.
If you’re setting up a workbook for other people to use, they’ll appreciate it if you make it easy to move around in the file. You can create a table of contents on the first sheet, and that will get them off to a good start. But then what?
Once they’re on one of the other sheets, how can they get back to the table of contents, or go directly to a different sheet? We’ll add a drop down list of sheets, to make it easy to go to the one that you need.
Happy Pi Day! In this week’s roundup, troubleshoot large Excel files, free webinars, reporting tips, and much more.
Last week I was updating one of my Excel sample files, and noticed that it was way bigger than it should be. Most of the sample files are just a few kilobytes in size, but this one was about 1.5 MB. What was going on?
Here’s how I found the problem, and a macro that you can use for troubleshooting in your workbooks.
