Excel Tips


Excel 2024: Surveys & Forms in Excel »

December 17, 2024

I often start my live Excel seminars off by asking you to point your cell phone camera at a giant bar code I have projected on the screen. That QR code leads to a three-question survey. Answers automatically flow into my Excel worksheet and those answers get used in the afternoon demo of 3D Maps.


Excel 2024: Format as a Façade »

December 13, 2024

Excel is amazing at storing one number and presenting another number. Choose any cell and select Currency format. Excel adds a dollar sign and a comma and presents the number, rounded to two decimal places.


Excel 2024: Fill in a Flash »

December 9, 2024

Excel 2013 added a new data-cleansing tool called Flash Fill.


Excel 2024: Build Org Charts with the Visio Data Visualizer in Excel »

December 5, 2024

Most people with Microsoft 365 will have a new Visio Data Visualizer tool in Excel. It is found on the Insert tab, in the Add-Ins group.


Excel 2024: Perform Sentiment Analysis in Excel »

December 2, 2024

It is easy to quantify survey data when it is multiple choice: You use a pivot table to figure out the percentage for each answer. But what about free-form text answers? These are hard to process if you have hundreds or thousands of them.


Excel 2024: The Forecast Sheet Can Handle Some Seasonality »

November 28, 2024

Before Excel 2016, Excel offered a few forecasting tools that did not fit in every situation. If your sales data included some seasonality, the old forecasting tools would do a bad job.


Excel 2024: Build a Pivot Table on a Map Using 3D Maps »

November 25, 2024

3D Maps (Power Map) is available in the Office 365 versions of Excel 2013 and all versions of Excel 2016. Using 3D Maps, you can build a pivot table on a map. You can fly through your data and animate the data over time.


Excel 2024: Data From Picture is Not Power Query »

November 21, 2024

Use your phone to take a picture of a receipt. Then, copy the image, use Picture From Clipboard and Excel can insert data from the picture into Excel.


Excel 2024: Use Fuzzy Match in Power Query »

November 18, 2024

There's a research and development team at Microsoft known as Microsoft Labs. Almost 10 years ago, it invented a free Fuzzy Match add-in for Excel. A fuzzy matching algorithm looks for words that share a percentage of characters in common.