Excel Numbers Do Not Sort or Add Correctly

Last week, I heard from someone who was having a problem sorting some numbers in Excel. He sent me a small sample file that showed a few of the dates and numbers that just wouldn’t sort correctly.

My first guess was that the data had been copied from a website – that can cause some strange behaviour, when you paste it into Excel. A quick check with the COUNT and COUNTA functions showed that none of the values in cells C3:C6 were real numbers – they were text.

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Excel Chart Compares High and Low Scores

Last weekend, I helped someone who needed a chart for a fantasy football league, to show the highest and lowest win/loss scores for each week. To help explain what it should look like, they posted a picture of a hand drawn chart, similar to the picture below.

By the way, I created the sketch in Excel, by using the Marker option, in the Artistic Effects. Who knew that Excel was so artistically talented?

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Excel Report Diagnostic Display

Did you ever print and distribute pivot table reports in Excel, only to discover – too late – that they weren’t showing the correct information? To help save you from wasted time and paper, and possible embarrassment, AlexJ is sharing his Report Diagnostic Display technique today.

You might remember some of his other handy tips, such as

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Excel Roundup 20141006

In this video, Annie Cushing shows how to create a scrolling table, by using the INDEX function and a scroll bar form control. This technique would work nicely in a dashboard, where space is limited.

For more dashboard tips, take a look at Mynda Treacy’s Excel Dashboard course which has just opened for registration, until Oct. 23rd. Details are in the Announcements section, below.

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