Excel Tips

Excel 2024: Audit a Worksheet With Spreadsheet Inquire »

June 18, 2024

Inquire was developed by a company called Prodiance that offered the slick Spreadsheet Compare tool for $145 per person per year. The Excel team liked it so much that Microsoft bought out Prodiance and gave the tool for free to anyone who is on Pro Plus, Professional Plus, or Enterprise Level E3.

Excel 2024: See All Formulas at Once »

June 17, 2024

You inherit a spreadsheet from a former co-worker and you need to figure out how the calculations work. You could visit each cell, one at a time, and look at the formula in the formula bar. Or you could quickly toggle between pressing F2 and Esc to see the formula right in the cell.

Excel 2024: Quickly Convert Formulas to Values »

June 13, 2024

I always say there are five ways to do anything in Excel. Converting live formulas to values is a task that has far more than five ways. But I will bet that I can teach you two ways that are faster than what you are using now.

Excel 2024: Use F4 for Absolute Reference or Repeating Commands »

June 12, 2024

The mighty F4 key should be in your Excel arsenal for two completely different reasons.

Excel 2024: Slicers for Pivot Tables From Two Data Sets »

June 11, 2024

Say that you have two different data sets. You want a pivot table from each data set and you want those two pivot tables to react to one slicer.

Excel 2024: Pivot Table with Sum and Average Total Rows (MDX) »

June 10, 2024

Check out this impossible pivot table. Details for Sum of Sales. Total for Sum of Sales. Then, without any details for Average of Sales, a Total row for Average of Sales. Notice that there are no hidden rows between row 33 and 34.

Excel 2024: Compare Budget Versus Actual via Power Pivot »

June 7, 2024

Budgets are done at the top level revenue by product line by region by month. Actuals accumulate slowly over time, invoice by invoice, line item by line item. Comparing the small Budget file to the voluminous Actual data has been a pain forever.

Excel 2024: Eliminate VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP with the Data Model »

June 6, 2024

Say that you have a data set with product, date, customer, and sales information. The IT department forgot to put sector in there. Here is a lookup table that maps customer to sector.

Excel 2024: Ask OpenAI Questions from Excel Using Excel Labs »

June 5, 2024

A team of Microsoft researchers in Cambridge England have developed a free add-in for Excel called Excel Labs. At press time, there are three tools in the add-in: The Advanced Formula Environment, a function called LABS.GENERATIVEAI, and a Python Editor.