Excel Tips


Place People on Bell Curve »

June 19, 2018

Jimmy in Huntsville wants to plot a bell curve showing the average scores of several people. When Jimmy asked the question during my Power Excel Seminar, I thought back to one of my more popular videos on YouTube.


Combine Based on Common Column »

June 14, 2018

David from Florida asks today's question: "I have two workbooks. Both have the same data in column A, but the remaining columns are different. How can I merge those two workbooks?"


Comma Just Comma »

June 7, 2018

There are a few things that continue to drive me crazy about Excel. One of them is the "Comma Style" icon that is in the middle of the Home tab of the Ribbon. The tooltip for this icon claims that it will add a thousands separator to your numbers.


VBA Insert Picture Bug »

June 6, 2018

I needed to have an Excel macro insert a picture in Excel. I turned on the macro recorder, inserted the picture. But when I used that recorded code, the picture will not appear on any other computer. Instead, I get a red X where the picture should be.


Save As Keeping Original Open »

June 5, 2018

There are many times in a month where I need an Excel workbook to create many copies of itself. I usually get into a logic bug by opening *the* workbook and I start to write code to loop through a list and use File, Save As to save a copy of the workbook.


Pivot Table Search Bug »

May 31, 2018

An interesting problem from Sam in Nashville: Sam wonders why his pivot table does not correctly refresh after he uses the Search box in the Filter drop-downs in his pivot table.


Pivot Table No Custom Sort »

May 30, 2018

Sometimes, if you actually know the name of a feature, it is easy to find how to control that feature. But with today's topic, most people who get stung by this "bug" have no idea why it is happening. They will report a symptom along the lines of: "For some reason, two of our employees keep appearing at the top of our pivot tables". I will often predict that the employee is named June or May or maybe even Friday.


Round To Quarter Hour »

May 29, 2018

Another question from my Atlanta Power Excel seminar: How can you round billable time up to the next quarter hour?


Inserting Alternating Rows »

May 24, 2018

Today's question from the Atlanta Power Excel seminar. "I have data formatted with every other row in grey. When I insert two new rows in the middle of the data, both of the new rows end up grey instead of following the pattern."