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How To

• Excel Geek Express—otherwise known as Quick Analysis

  18 Apr 2013

  Guest blogger Emily Warn is co-owner of Two Pens , which provides blogging services and teaches business how to write content that grows a social media following. My writer friends think I'm a geek. You can do what?! I can create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number...
• Format and customize Excel 2013 charts quickly with the new Formatting Task pane

  27 Mar 2013

  The new Excel offers a rich set of charting capabilities that make creating and customizing charts simpler and more intuitive. One part of the fluid new experience is the Formatting Task pane. Until now, precise adjustments to chart elements were made in the Format dialog box. The box sometimes obscured...
• Use Webservice functions to automatically update Excel 2013 spreadsheets with online data

  21 Mar 2013

  This post on exploring Webservice functions is brought to you by Lee Bizek, a Program Manager in the Excel Team. Have you ever wanted to incorporate data from online resources into your Excel spreadsheets, such as stock quotes, weather, Bing Search results or even Twitter feeds? With new Webservice functions...
• Going “Kamping with a K”: How we quickly organized a 20-person trip in Web Excel on SkyDrive

  21 Feb 2013

  This week we continue to highlight new features we've recently released in Web Excel, available to all users through SkyDrive. This post is brought to you by Lee Bizek, a Program Manager in the Excel Team. My wife, Korrin, and I go camping every year with our closest friends. Since she isn’t a...
• New support for query tables in Excel Services improves workbook sharing across an organization

  18 Feb 2013

  This week we're highlighting some improvements in Excel Services , as part of the SharePoint 2013 release. This post is brought to you by Prash Shirolkar, a Program Manager in the Excel Team. Take one last look: The error message below is now a thing of the past. With the enhancements to Excel Services...
• Open Excel workbooks in separate windows and view them side by side

  7 Feb 2013

  This week we continue exploring new features in Excel 2013. This post is brought to you by Chad Rothschiller, a Program Manager in the Excel Team. "How do I open my workbooks in separate windows?" This has been a common inquiry from many of our customers who want to look at their workbooks side by side...
• Need to combine two chart types? Create a combo chart and add a second axis

  25 Jan 2013

  This post is brought to you by Robin Wakefield, a Program Manager in the Excel Team. Have you ever had two different types of data that you wanted to show in one chart? For example you may want to plot actual revenue with forecasted revenue to compare the two values. In an earlier post , we showed you...
• Choose your own PivotTable

  15 Jan 2013

  This post is brought to you by Allie Rutherford, a Program Manager on the Analytics and Presentation team. In many offices, there always seems to be at least one person who is referred to as an Excel expert/master/wizard. Their masterful status often originates from one fact: they can make a PivotTable...
• Interacting with Your Website’s Data Using Web Excel Mashups

  5 Dec 2012

  This post is brought to you by Harrison Gordon, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team. What exactly is an Excel Mashup? With Web Excel, you can embed workbooks into your website or blog. This alone is really powerful and lets you show a workbook directly in your website (it also lets you easily...
• Tricks for creating dropdown lists that let you select multiple items

  21 Aug 2012

  Our guest blogger Debra Dalgleish is a consultant specializing in Microsoft Office programming and development. She offers her Excel wisdom every week on the Contextures blog and has received the Excel MVP award every year since 2001. At the Mystical Magic Factory*, one of the perks is that office employees...
• Plug into your data: Connecting Excel to an Access database

  14 Aug 2012

  Northwind Trading Company, a small wholesale food business, is doing quite well since they moved online. Retail merchants across the country buy everything from salmon to granola and have it shipped quickly to their stores. Their customer information is stored in an Access database, and now, the marketing...
• Too much data to view? Use Auto Outline to group it

  9 Jul 2012

  Puget Sound Pets can't keep enough dog chews on the shelves for all the Corgies they sell (or rodents for the pet Pythons). And they can't keep up with the sales data they generate from their booming business. To better understand their revenue stream, they need to view it on a month-to-month and store...
• Score! Merge data from multiple worksheets

  5 Jul 2012

  The Decatur Golden Gators soccer team is hitting the pitch (that's a field for you uninitiated folks) to perfect their skills and beat their better-funded rivals. The coach is excited and fiscally worried. Lining up mini-vans, buying snacks, and replacing torn jerseys is not cheap! Rolling these expenses...
• Our eight best tutorials on Excel charts

  30 May 2012

  Excel spreadsheets are all about numbers. But tons of numbers are often not the most effective way to communicate. That's where charts come in handy. Charts can display numeric data in a graphical format, making it easy to understand large quantities of data and the relationships among data. If you want...
• Count values that meet a condition with the COUNTIF function

  4 May 2012

  (This post was first published in March 2011. Since lots of you want to learn more about the COUNT function, we're republishing it again. Let us know in the Comments section what other things you want to know about COUNT. ) [ NOTE : Near the bottom of this post, I've listed some updated how-tos on embedding...
• Merging and splitting cells or data

  12 Apr 2012

  (First published in April 2011, this post remains very popular with customers.We thought others would like to know about it, too, so today we're moving it back to the top slot on the Excel blog home page.) The title of this post sounds simple. Should be easy to do, right? But customers tell us that it...
• VLOOKUP Tutorial: Updating prices in a master price list

  28 Mar 2012

  MVP Bill Jelen has created this VLOOKUP tutorial for those of you who have a basic working knowledge of Excel but want to improve your skills. This tutorial assumes you've heard about the VLOOKUP function and its benefits, but that you don't really know how or when you might use it. Bill uses the example...
• Samples for learning conditional formatting: icons, formulas, cell values, and more

  12 Mar 2012

  When we released Excel 2010, we published a workbook for you to download , which contains samples of conditional formatting rules. The samples are really helpful for learning how to track trends, check status, spot data, and find top values. But the samples don't just abstractly explain conditional formatting...
• Conditional Formatting Rules Simplified

  27 Feb 2012

  Thanks to Amit Velingkar for writing this blog post. (We are re-publishing this post first published in April 2010. Why? Because so many of you keep searching for it. This is the second in a series of oldies but goodies Excel posts.) Conditional formatting is a popular feature and is a great way to easily...
• Go beyond the basic chart type

  22 Feb 2012

  Lots and lots of you want to brush up on your Excel skills by going beyond creating basic charts. How do we know? Because so many of you click this page. Today, we're moving it back to the top of our home page to make it easier for you to find. Excel comes with lots of chart types, including column,...