Excel Tutorials

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 […]

Excel has a built-in function called LEN that counts the number of characters in a cell. This can be very useful for counting characters and finding problem records.

This week was one where multiple requests converged. I had two friends that needed to send emails to their customers. One had their information in an Excel spreadsheet and the other exported their internal databases to Excel. Both thought there were problems with many email addresses and wanted to know if there was an easy way to find invalid email addresses before sending out the emails.

Excel has a the ability to set a range of cells and give them a name. You may have seen this when you print a certain area by highlighting the columns and rows. However, that same feature can be used in other areas such formulas. It makes interpreting your worksheet much easier.

Microsoft Excel has some nice features that can save repetitive typing. One that people are familiar with is using a fill series for continuous cells. These are often common values or series such as numbers, dates and months. This feature is called an Excel Custom List and can be used for a creating repetitive data series that you might use in the office or at home.

Excel is a great tool, but sometimes the spreadsheet files we get to work with aren’t ideal. A classic example is you’re given a file that has one column that you’d really like to split into multiple ones. That was the scenario I faced when I got a large file that had street addresses in one field. Using the LEFT and RIGHT text formulas, I was able to have Excel extract text substrings into two new fields.

One item I’ve learned from using computers is that there is usually more than one way to solve a problem. This week two people approached me with a similar problem. They were trying to get a simple, but long address list from Microsoft Word into Microsoft Excel. One tried to use macros and the other resorted to cut and paste. In each case, I thought a simpler solution involved Word’s Search and Replace feature. Here’s Part 1 of a two part tutorial.

In our earlier article we explained there were several ways to convert Microsoft Word data such as address listings to Microsoft Excel. This next method starts by converting your text to a table. You’ll probably find this method easier.