Excel Tutorials

Do you ever play the “what-if” game when you see data? For example, how many more widgets would we need to sell to get our 20% bonus. In my case, I was trying to figure out many more voters we needed to win. Excel has a simple feature for these type of questions.

Everyone looks at information in a slightly different way. Some people create Excel spreadsheets where the data is useful, but it doesn’t work with the way you view or interact with the data. One common example is where you want to transpose or switch Excel row or column data so Row A data becomes Column A data and so on.

Recently, I volunteered to help a friend on a project which required delivering a weekly Excel summary. When I asked my friend how the spreadsheet looked, he hesitated. He looked me in the eyes and said, “It’s too complicated”. My immediate reaction was disappointment. I knew the one I produced was simpler, but I didn’t know what “too complicated” meant. It turns out the data was fine. I simply needed to show him how to freeze the Excel columns to make scrolling easier.

Like many people, I have a love-hate relationship with software. It’s great when it works, but it’s so frustrating when you get a cryptic error message. And these messages seem to appear when you’re short on time and patience

Recently, a friend asked about fixing an Excel spreadsheet where the subscriber name was in 1 column. He wanted the name separated so he could send a personalized mailing. This is not the first time this question has arisen. The key to solving this problem is to parse or split the data using the Text to Columns feature.

Excel allows you to sort your columns and rows by lots of ways. One less obvious way is to sort items by color. This is handy if you apply a background color to a cell or different font color. This tutorial explains how to do the sort. You can also filter by color.

Earlier this month, I got a request from a manager in town asking if I could randomly select 150 people from a membership list. No darts allowed. I think the purpose was to do a survey, but maybe it was to select contest winners. It turns out that Microsoft Excel has a random number generator which was the key to my solution.

This Excel tutorial is the follow up to the previous article we did on using Excel’s built-in macro recorder. It will introduce you to the macro editor and layout so you can create or edit your own macros. It’s also a great way to learn how the macros work.

If you’ve ever wanted to dabble with Excel macros, this tutorial and video on the macro recorder will get you started. Includes a sample workbook link so you can follow along.

Have you ever received an Excel file and wondered how it was filtered without checking each column’s data filter? Or, maybe you needed to send a file and show your filters. That was a problem I faced recently when I started with a list of 3200 non-profits for the county. I needed a way for […]