It’s been a bad week for Excel, with big news stories about spreadsheet errors. Two Harvard professors were in the news after a student at the University of Massachusetts found errors in their economic research paper.
Click to Move Excel List Items Up or Down
Your challenge for today is to come up with a real-life use for this nifty (do the kids still say nifty?) Excel scrolling tool.
Continue reading “Click to Move Excel List Items Up or Down”
Create a Running Total in an Excel Column
If you’re using a pivot table, there are built in features that lets you show a running total, or a percent running total. Here’s the command to show a % Running Total in a pivot table.
Continue reading “Create a Running Total in an Excel Column”
Highlight Duplicate Records in an Excel List
With Excel’s conditional formatting, you can highlight cells based on specific rules. There are some built-in rules available, and you can use formulas to create your own formatting rules.
Watch the Video
To see the steps for setting up the conditional formatting, watch this short video. The written steps are below the video.
To download the sample file, go to my Contextures website: Highlight Duplicate Records in a List
Highlight Duplicates
In this example, we want highlight duplicate records in a table. There is a built-in rule for highlighting duplicate values in a single column, but nothing that will check an entire row.
So, we’ll create our own rule, and it will require a new column on the worksheet, before we add the conditional formatting.
Concatenate the Data
In the sample data, there are two identical rows, and these should be highlighted after we apply our conditional formatting.
The first step is to use the CONCATENATE function to combine all the data into one cell in each row.
Add a new heading in cell G1 – AllData – and in cell G2, enter this formula, to combine the data from all the cells in that row.
=CONCATENATE(A2,B2,C2,D2,E2,F2)
Next, copy the formula down to the last row of data.
Apply the Conditional Formatting
Then, a conditional formatting rule is set, to color the rows that are duplicate records. We’ll use the COUNTIF function to check for duplicates in the AllData column.
=COUNTIF($G$2:$G$8,$G2)>1
If there is more than one instance of a data combination, that indicates a duplicate row, and the cells in columns A:F will be coloured. The two rows with duplicate records are highlighted, so our conditional formatting formula worked!
Download the Sample File
For detailed instructions, and to download the sample file, go to my Contextures website: Highlight Duplicate Records in a List
_________________________
Create an Excel Table from a List
When you create a list in Excel, do you automatically convert that list to a formatted table?
Create a Dynamic Hyperlink
Last week, I heard from Kevin Lehrbass, who runs the My Spreadsheet Lab website. Kevin has posted an Excel video on YouTube, that shows how you can make a dynamic hyperlink, using array formulas.
Create a Drop Down List With Symbols
To make data entry easier, you can create a drop down list in an Excel cell, using data validation.
Show RSS Feeds on Excel Worksheet
As you’ve heard, Google Reader will be disappearing in a few months <sigh>, and we’ll have to find other ways to follow our favourite blogs. I’m looking for a replacement, but haven’t found anything perfect yet. How about you?
Go Back to Previous Locations in Excel
In Excel, you can create named ranges, and go to those ranges by selecting a name from the Name Box.
Limit Date Range with Excel Data Validation
Yesterday, one of my clients emailed to let me know that she was having trouble entering January dates in a file that I had created.
My first guess was that there was an issue with the regional settings, because her company uses the dd/mm/yyyy format.
But when I tried entering a January date, with my mm/dd/yyyy settings, I got an “Invalid date” message too.
Limit Dates with Data Validation
The date that I had entered – 1/3/13 – was a valid date and in a valid format, so I checked the data validation settings. And that’s where I found the problem.
The cell had been restricted to dates from 60 days prior to the current date:
=TODAY()-60
and up to 60 days after the current date:
=TODAY()+60
Fix the Problem
Those date range settings had made sense when we set up the file. The date range limits prevented people from accidentally entering strange dates, such as mistyping a year – 2031 instead of 2013, for example.
Do you ever find records like that in your database or workbook? It can really mess things up!
Anyway, a simple change to the data validation formula fixed the problem. Instead of 60 days, I changed the formulas to 120 days.
=TODAY()-120
and
=TODAY()+120
It still prevents those year typos, but gives my client a bigger window for entering data in the file.
Video: Prevent Invalid Dates
In this video, three different data validation methods are used to validate dates. From the Allow drop down in the data validation settings, the following options will be used:
- Specify a starting date and an ending date. (Date option)
- Show a drop down list of valid dates (List option)
- Create a rule in a custom formula (Custom option)
Video Timeline:
- 0:00 Drop Down List of Dates
- 3:04 Set a Date Range
- 5:43 Check the Year
- 6:55 Get the Sample File
More Data Validation for Dates
For more examples of data validation for dates, you can visit the Excel Data Validation – Dates page on my Contextures website.
_____________