Excel Tips


Excel 2020: Change What Drives You Crazy About Excel »

May 18, 2020

I‘ve managed to lobby the Excel team to get a few changes into Excel. It isn‘t always easy. It took me eight years of lobbying to get the Repeat All Item Labels feature added to Excel 2010. It took seven years to get the Pivot Table Defaults feature added.


Excel 2020: Why Do Pivot Tables Count Instead of Sum? »

May 11, 2020

In almost every seminar, someone asks why pivot tables default to count instead of sum. This long-standing problem was fixed in May 2018 for Office 365 subscribers. The Count was triggered if you had one revenue cell that contained text or an empty cell.


Excel 2020: Another Way to Calculate Year-Over-Year »

May 6, 2020

Instead of creating a formula outside of the pivot table, you can do this inside the pivot table. Start from the image with column D empty. Drag Revenue a second time to the Values area.


Excel 2020: Fill in the Blanks in the Annoying Outline View »

April 30, 2020

If your pivot table is in Tabular or Outline Form and you have more than one row field, the pivot table defaults to leaving a lot of blank cells in the outer row fields.


Excel 2020: Format One Cell in a Pivot Table »

April 29, 2020

This is new in Office 365 starting in 2018. You can right-click any cell in a pivot table and choose Format Cell. Any formatting that you apply is tied to that data in the pivot table.


Excel 2020: Format a Pivot Table »

April 27, 2020

The Design tab has a gallery with 84 built-in formats for pivot tables. Choose a design from the gallery and the colors change.


Excel 2020: Rearrange fields in a pivot table »

April 23, 2020

The power of pivot tables is the ability to rearrange the fields. If your manager decides you should put Regions across the top and products down the side, it is two drags to create the new report.


Excel 2020: Get Ideas from Artificial Intelligence »

April 20, 2020

A new artificial intelligence feature debuted in Office 365 in early 2018. Originally called Insights, the feature was re-branded as Ideas and moved to the far right side of the Home tab of the Ribbon by September of 2018. Excel Insights will analyze your Excel data to search for patterns and return a series of interesting facts or trends about the data.


Excel 2020: Format or Copy the Subtotal Rows »

April 9, 2020

It is a little odd that Subtotals only bolds the customer column and not anything else in the subtotal row. Follow these steps to format the subtotal rows: