While SUMMING data is probably the most common task in Excel, I am surprised that many people are not aware of this Excel feature – AutoSum. It is super handy especially when you know the shortcut of it, which is ALT+=.
Tip: When you make the selection, make sure you have selected an “extra” row and/or column to reside the total(s).
As simple as this! 🙂
This post is in response to the following Mr.Excel video
where Mr. Excel Bill Jelen solved the problem with Advanced Filter.
Indeed I got a similar question from a colleague recently for filtering multiple criteria on a single column. This is perfect timing to write this post to demonstrate a less-known feature of Auto-Filter.
Maybe yes maybe no. Even though you have seen it before, you may have no idea what it does. Let’s explore it now.
We have a list of account numbers (that are stored as text). What we want to achieve is to filter all account number that starts with either 6, 7, or 8.
Flash Fill was introduced in Excel 2013. After 6 years, it is still a hidden gem of modern Excel that most regular Excel users do not even know its existence. Whenever I show to my colleagues what Flash Fill is capable of, they are all impressed and think that this is their “Greatest Discovery” moment.
So in this post, I am going to show you in a flash what Flash Fill can do with 16 examples.
Here’s the video on my YouTube channel. Please turn on CC for English subtitles.
If you prefer reading to watching, you will see GIFs showing the examples below:
Note: CTRL+E is the keyboard shortcut for Flash Fill which had been used in all the GIFs in the coming demonstration.
Long time ago, I wrote a blog post How much do I need to pay? which was not really related to Excel but calculation of a random daily event. Similar to that old story, a friend asked me for an Excel solution for a different scenario, which I think is quite interesting and really need Excel to do the calculation.
Long story short – when we have more than one birthday stars in a party, maybe a birthday star should treat other birthday star(s) as well. Thus, s/he will need to pay a share. WOW… it sounds like an Excel challenge that I really like to take.
Here’s my solution:
In the previous blog post, we see how Flash Fill extracts First Name and Last Name from an email address in a format shown above. I’ve also recorded a video for that post.
Flash Fill is so smart to detect the pattern of CamalCase and return the desired result in a flash. However, if you are still using Excel 2010 or before, it is NO EASY TASK and required advanced skills in formula writing. The key challenge is to identify the position of the second CAPITAL letter in the text string. Once we have identified the position of it, getting the First Name and Last Name is totally manageable.
Here’s the formula to identify the position of the second CAPITAL LETTER:
{=MATCH(TRUE,CODE(MID(A2,ROW(INDIRECT("2:"& FIND("@",A2)-1)),1))<=90,0)+1}
Note: This is an array formula, requiring Ctrl+Shift+Enter
How the formula works? Continue reading
What’s even more unbelievable? The above can be done in just a couple of minutes.
The technique discussed in this blog post is applicable to Excel 2016 or later. And the techniques used are mainly Flash Fill and Quick Analysis, which are available since Excel 2013. But why I said it’s applicable to Excel 2016 or later? Because the chart types Histogram and Pareto were introduced in Excel 2016.
I am not saying that we cannot perform the above transformation using Excel 2013/2010. It’s just a matter of time + higher skill level is required.
Let’s see how it can be done in Excel 2016! Continue reading
Glad to share with you my second video here. This video is about how to plot a compelling to compare Actual vs. Budget, Target and Last Year data. The written instruction is available in previous post – A compelling chart in three minutes…
I spent more or less the same amount of time (~12 hours in total, on and off) to produce it comparing to the first video. However this video is 8-minute long, which is eight times longer than the first one. In a way, I am doing it more efficiently. 🙂
Honestly it takes much more time and effort than writing a blogpost. After making just two videos, I can imagine the GREAT efforts all other Excel geniuses like ExcelIsFun, MrExcel.com, Leila Gharani, Excel On Fire (just to name a few) they have put on their channels, where you will find a lot of great Excel videos. Really appreciate their efforts! 👍 Indeed they have inspired me a lot through my Excel journey.
I am not dreaming about my channel will become as popular as theirs. Though I do hope, my channel will get more popularity from time to time, especially in the Cantonese-speaking communities. My goal is to produce one to two videos per month. Should you have any comments/suggestions, please leave your comments.
Last but not least, if you like my video, please SUBSCRIBE my channel.
If
Then
In business world, we often compare actual sales to various benchmarks such as budget, target, and last year. In this post, I am going to show you step-by-step how to make a compelling chart for this purpose. This is basically a simplified version of bullet chart, and is super-easy to create. I hope you find it useful and relevant.
Kung Hey Fat Choi! This week is Chinese New Year. I wish you a fruitful, healthy, and rewarding Year of Pig!
I have almost one week off for CNY holiday. I have cleaned my PC and spared 50G+ space in the hard drive; got a new fantastic video production and editing tool; and more importantly produced my first Excel video and posted it on YouTube.
Indeed, I have been thinking about the topics for making my first video. There are a few on my list but I could not decide. Then all a sudden when I was having shower one day (yes… many ideas come from 🚿), an idea came to my mind: Why don’t make my first video for my top blogpost – When unhide row doesn’t work…? That’s why we have this video: Continue reading
Chinese New Year is coming really soon. Let’s talk about something about “New” in Excel in this post… but don’t make me wrong, I am not talking about any new features in Excel 2016/2019/365. Indeed, what I am going to discuss about is a feature that exists for a long long time, but not many people are using it (at least not to the people I work with).
Interestingly, this “New” stuff is very common and I believe all Excel users have used it at the most fundamental way.
Still have no idea what I am talking about? Watch the following:
Note: All screenshots are prepared using Excel for Office 365
Yes… That’s the “New” stuff I am talking about. 🙂
You may be wondering… Excuse me?? What???…
We don’t know what we don’t know. The best way is to learn something new is to explore the web (or world), and/or learn from experts.
Sometimes we just don’t know, or even don’t expect what Excel could do for us.
If you’ve ever felt like:
“My Excel reports take way too long to update each month/week”
“I spend hours collating and cleaning data, updating formulas and charts and then no one reads my reports anyway, what’s the point?”
“If I could just impress the boss I’d get that pay rise/promotion I deserve”
“I need to get my Excel skills up to date so I can stand out from the crowd of other job applicants”
“I’m not sure how to approach setting up my Excel workbook the right way, so it’s easy to build and maintain”
Then you should spend a few hours in the coming days to watch the three webinars (Yes, I recommend you to watch all three webinars) by Mynda. You will find the time worthy spent as you will learn many time-saver techniques in using Excel; and learn something about Power BI. Continue reading
Is it a feature or a bug?
This is an extension of the previous post, in which we discussed the use of INDIRECT trick to deal with Excel Table in Conditional Formatting, to fix the problem we face demonstrated below:
David N gave a magical tip to handle that DIRECTLY. Here’s his comment:
I believe you’ll also find that simply writing your conditional formula to refer to an entire column from a Table somehow enables that range reference to auto-magically grow as the Table grows without needing to use INDIRECT or other trickery…
p.s. I like the term “auto-magically” a lot! 🙂
You may download sample file to follow along.
When setting up conditions for Conditional Formatting in Excel, have you ever tried to set a formula that refers to a Excel Table, but failed?
First of all, why we want to refer to Excel Table in Conditional Formatting? There is one simple answer: To accept new data automatically.
Let’s look back at the sample we used in the previous two blog posts. In the following screen shot, you see that the formula used refers to a “fixed” range of $I$2:$I$9. It works totally fine given the current static situation. 
But what if we are moving into May and are ready to input more “PublicHolidays” to the list?
Oh no… it didn’t work as the formula was hard-coded.
To fix that, we need to go into the formula of Conditional Formatting and revised the hard-coded range. (provided that you remember to do it; and/or your user knows how to do it) 🙂
That’s why we want to make the formula used in Conditional Formatting be dynamic!
There are two common ways to do dynamic ranges: Continue reading
Here’s the situation:
Well, you may not consider the above layout bad. Indeed it is quite common in workplace. A blank row is inserted for whatever reasons (and some people quite insist on it)…
Let’s see how this “bad” layout complicates the whole process of setting up of conditional formatting to highlight weekends.
Note: This post is a continuation of previous post. You may want to read the previous post first if you do not know how to use conditional formatting to highlight weekends.
It is not uncommon to work with dates in Excel. Be it a Gantt chart for project management, a roster, or simply a calendar, we would like Excel to highlight non-working dates. One of the most common tasks should be highlighting weekends and public holidays. It could be a tedious manual task when you need to maintain it on monthly basis. The good news is this tedious, boring task can be done by conditional formatting with ease.
Leave the boring tasks to Excel, enjoy your life more. 🙂 Continue reading
Happy New Year! Wish you all an Excel-lent year of 2019!
As an Excel nerd, I’d like to spend my holidays on learning Excel… haha… I know I am abnormal. ;p My recent love of Excel is Power Query (M) and Power Pivot (DAX). As their names say, they add POWER to Excel.
I really like Power Query as the user-friendly User Interface offers most of the Power! We can do lots of amazing stuffs by applying steps in Power Query editor, simply via the UI. Having said that, learning the M language behind the scenes would definitely take you to the next level. However, it is not an easy journey…
If you are already familiar with the UI of Power Query Editor and are ready to go further with M, I’d highly recommend you spend an hour to watch the “extensive” introduction of M code of Power Query by Mike Girvin of ExcelIsFun:
Like it?
Bear in mind that, this is only the beginning. You will still need to study and practice, again and again, to become a true master of Power Query which is my new year resolution. 🙂 Let’s work hard toward this!
Side notes:
Power Query is available as Adds-In for Excel 2010 / 2013. You may download it from https://www.microsoft.com/en-hk/download/details.aspx?id=39379
If you are using Excel 2016 or Office 365, Power Query is already loaded. It is under “Data” tab and renamed as Get and Transform.
This post is a continuation of the previous one – Highlighting Top X values with Conditional Formatting in #Excel
So I will go straight to the point. For background information, please read the previous post. 🙂
Select the data range –> Go to Home Tab –> Conditional Formatting –> Icon Sets
Choose the icon set you like. For this demonstration, the set of flags is used.
This is the result you will see. However, we don’t want all three flags. We just want to have a green flag for the Top X value(s). So let’s manage it. Continue reading
Well… think this topic is too simple? How about doing this with
You may download a Sample File to follow along.
Let’s start with the basics first. Here is
Super easy! Indeed it is a very handy way to highlight Top X values in a dataset. The only drawback is the Top X is statics. If you want to change the number of values to be highlighted later, you need to go deep into the conditional formatting to revise the Top X value:
Not quite ideal…
When talking about keyboard shortcuts, there is always discussion on what’s the most time-saving shortcuts, what are the top X shortcuts you should learn, what is the most frequently used shortcuts, etc…
Just to name a few, Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+Z to undo, Ctrl+C to Copy, together with Ctrl+V to paste. I won’t disagree these are popular shortcuts and probably the most frequently used shortcuts for most users. Nevertheless, we always want to learn more and then start searching on the Internet for various shortcuts. But did you know how many shortcuts are there for Excel? I don’t know the exact number, but I know there is a lot! More than I can remember a quarter of them. So it is not practical to try to learn them all.
Then the question is:
My answer to this question is: You are asking the wrong question. Your question should be:
Have you ever had this question? From my experience, 99.9% users (I work with) have no idea what it is or even are not aware of that option in Paste Special.
Are you one of them? Let’s try to understand what it does through the following imaginary conversation between Excel and you…
Continue reading
Disclosure: The author earns a small amount of commission (at no additional cost to you) for the product/service successfully sold through the links of [Affiliate].
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