Results for:
Formulas and functions

• Tips on using seven heavenly text functions

  11 Oct 2011

  Harness the power of the suite of Text functions, such as RIGHT, LEFT, MID, FIND, LEN, TEXT, and REPLACE, and you'll be an unstoppable force. Okay, maybe that's a bit over the top. But learning to use these functions can really build your formula prowess. And it can be fun! Still a little extreme with...
• Clean up imported or pasted data in Excel

  20 Sep 2011

  The data in your beautiful spreadsheet doesn't necessarily start out that way, especially if you've copied or imported it in from some other place. By using some Excel functions and formatting techniques, you can make your names, dates and numbers look just the way you want. Chad Rothschiller, an Excel...
• Use the LEN function to get a cell's character count

  5 Jul 2011

  Ever wonder where the character count command is in Excel? It doesn't exist, at least not in the same sense as Word's word count feature --Excel isn't a word processor. You can't select a block of text and quickly see how many characters the selection contains. But Excel does have a nifty little function...
• Portable formulas: A PowerPivot benefit you’ll never believe you lived without

  5 May 2011

  Former Excel team member Rob Collie is CTO of Pivotstream and writes the PowerPivotPro blog, describing his experiences adopting Excel PowerPivot. Hey everybody, last time I posted here I talked about the top 5 benefits that PowerPivot provides to Excel pros. But I left one crucial advantage out, perhaps...
• Learn the ins and outs of dates and formulas in this free training course

  3 May 2011

  Have you ever wanted to subtract one date from another? Or find out how many workdays until vacation? Or maybe you need to figure out a project end date. You can do all of this and more by using date functions in Excel formulas. As long as you type a date in a format that Excel recognizes: 8/22/2011...
• IF and only IF (video)

  29 Mar 2011

  This post is all about IF--not the poem by Rudyard Kipling, or the 1971 hit song by Bread, but the function . The IF function is used in many Office programs, but most of us know it from Microsoft Excel: IF(logical_test, [value_if_true], [value_if_false]) IF is one of the most searched-for words on Office...
• Going Back to the Topic of Functions For a Moment…

  8 Oct 2009

  A few weeks back I wrote several posts on the improvements we have made to Excel’s function library. I’d now like to share with you a draft of a whitepaper we are planning to release when Excel 2010 ships. The whitepaper describes all of the improvements we are making. It also includes detailed descriptions...
• New Functions Bring New UI

  16 Sep 2009

  In the past two posts I talked about all of the improvements we have made to the function library in terms of accuracy and consistency. In this post I will describe the UI changes we have made to help users take advantage of these improvements in Excel 2010. In addition I will also talk about the backward...
• Function Consistency Improvements in Excel 2010

  14 Sep 2009

  The second part of the function improvements work we are making for Excel 2010 is to create a more consistent function library. We have implemented a new naming scheme to allow consistent and accurate naming convention for functions. Also, we have added new functions to the function library to round...
• Function Improvements in Excel 2010

  10 Sep 2009

  Thanks to Jessica Liu for putting together the next few posts on function improvements. In Excel 2010, we made many improvements to Excel's function library. Excel 2010 will feature an accurate and consistent function library while remaining compatible with previous versions of Excel. In this first blog...
• Week Numbers in Excel

  30 Jun 2009

  Today’s author is, Ron de Bruin, an Excel MVP . You can find more useful tips from Ron and links to Excel add-ins at his website: http://www.rondebruin.nl/ There are four primary week numbering systems in use worldwide. Each system has subtle differences that you should be aware of. Excel can work with...
• Formula to Access a List of Values Interspersed with Zeros or Blanks

  30 Jun 2009

  Today’s author is Bob Umlas, an Excel MVP since 1994, and author of This isn’t Excel, it’s Magic , a book that is filled with tips and tricks for getting the most out of Excel. This tip is a formula which enables you to access a list of values interspersed with zeros or blanks and pick up only the non...
• A Robust Way To Reference Multiple Columns In a Table

  9 Apr 2009

  I’m sure many of you have built a spreadsheet like this before: you’ve got a table of data; one of the columns in this table contains a formula which references a span of columns in the same table. The number of columns you need to reference may change over time as requirements change. How do you you...
• Analyzing Data: Functions or PivotTables

  23 Mar 2009

  Today’s author, Monica Poinescu, a Software Developer in Test on the Excel team, discusses two different approaches to analyzing data in Excel. Edit: I've attached a file at the bottom of this blog that contains spreadsheets of the examples discussed in this post. My earlier blog on the new Excel 2007...
• Simple Expense Tracking With New Excel 2007 Functions

  9 Feb 2009

  Today’s author, Monica Poinescu, a Software Developer in Test on the Excel team, gives an overview of some new functions in Excel 2007 and along the way shows us how to do some simple expense tracking. Considering the current economic environment, one may desire to better keep track of personal expenses...
• Creating a Master-Detail View in Excel

  24 Oct 2008

  Today's author, Dan Battagin, a Program Manager on the Excel team, talks about joining two tables in Excel (a.k.a. returning multiple rows for VLOOKUP). Today, we'll take a look at the VLOOKUP function, and work out a way to get around its major drawback - it returns only a single value that matches...
• Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2

  2 Oct 2008

  Today's author, Charlie Ellis, continues discussing the spreadsheet he built to solve Sudoku puzzles. In my previous post , I walked through a number of formulas for setting up the valid values and solution board. In this post we'll cover using iteration and other formula tricks to help solve the puzzle...
• Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 1/2

  30 Sep 2008

  Today's author, Charlie Ellis, a Program Manager on the Excel team, shares a spreadsheet he built in Excel for solving Sudoku puzzles. The spreadsheet can be found in the attachments at the bottom of this post. For those of you who don't already know, Sudoku is a type of logic puzzle (that I was completely...
• Understanding Floating Point Precision, aka “Why does Excel Give Me Seemingly Wrong Answers?”

  10 Apr 2008

  We sometimes get mails from our customers claiming to have found a calculation error in Excel, when in fact the calculation isn't wrong, but the side effects of binary floating point precision make it seem that way. Today's author: Jessica Liu, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses the way Excel...
• Manipulating and Massaging Data in Excel

  12 Nov 2007

  Today’s author: Chad Rothschiller, a program manager on the Excel team. Chad is going to discuss using formulas to 'clean up' data in Excel. Overview Excel is a great tool to use when you need to take data in one format, manipulate it into another format, and push the results along to another process...