Excel Blog

Our eight best tutorials on Excel charts

Emily Warn — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:27:00 GMT

Excel spreadsheets are all about numbers. But tons of numbers are often not the most effective way to communicate what you want. 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 to learn about Excel charts, you've come to the right place. We've pulled together out best tutorials and articles to get you started.

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What's the dif? Gridlines vs borders in spreadsheets

Dail Bridges — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:58:00 GMT

A lot of you want to know the difference between gridlines and borders. Gridlines help you work in a spreadsheet, and borders help you highlight important information in one for your audience. Gridlines appear automatically so you can see how your data is organized into rows and columns; borders need to be added by you so you can highlight certain cells. This post describes how to work with both of them.

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Split and merge data in URLs

Stacey Armstrong — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:43:00 GMT

Issue: I have a list of URLs with their corresponding page views. The URLs include a section of the site and the date when the page was published. I'd like to calculate the total number of page views by site section and the total number of page views by publication date. I want to reduce the time it would take to manually enter this data into new columns. To save time, I plan on using the Text to Columns wizard and Concatenate function rather than a complex formula. Once you learn the steps, it will take you only a few minutes to complete the tasks.

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Quick Trick: Resizing column widths in pivot tables

Stacey Armstrong — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:39:00 GMT

Who could be better than a Business Intelligence analyst at teaching us a thing or two about Excel? We asked our own number-crunching wizard Stacey Armstrong to share some Excel tricks she's learned along the way.

In this first one, she shows us how to change the default width of a column in a pivot table. Knowing this is especially helpful when you're working with data that that makes a row really long.

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Count values that meet a condition with the COUNTIF function

Gary Willoughby — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:39:00 GMT

Update: See near the bottom of this post for the latest Office how-tos on embedding Excel and PowerPoint files on web pages.

You probably know how to use the COUNT function to count cells that contain a value. But what if you want to count only the cells that meet a condition, such as being greater than or equal to a number or date you specify, or that matches text? That's where the COUNTIF function comes in really handy.

Keep reading to learn more, and try out this great function for free using the embedded worksheet in this post.

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Using multiple criteria in Excel Lookup formulas

Emily Warn — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 01:01:00 GMT

If you want to look up a value in a table using one criteria, it's simple. You can use a plain VLOOKUP formula. But if you want to use more than one criteria, what can you do? There are lots of ways using several Excel functions such as VLOOKUP, LOOKUP, MATCH, INDEX, etc. In this blog post, I'll show you a few of those ways.

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Merging and splitting cells or data

Frederique — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:30:00 GMT

The title of this post sounds simple. Should be easy to do, right? But customers tell us that it's very confusing and not at all clear where to find the features to get the results they want. It all depends on what you want to merge or split. For example, you may want to create a large header cell by splitting the cells below it into a number of smaller cells.

I often create such headers but use a different method than you'd expect, because an individual cell simply cannot be split into smaller cells. Instead, I merge several cells into one larger cell above the cells for which it will be the header. The result is exactly the same.

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And the winner of the VLOOKUP Great White Shark Award is...

Guest — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:13:00 GMT

JP Pinto! Congratulations!

His post was one of seven chosen by Bill Jelen as the most innovative ones published during VLOOKUP Week. He won a copy Bill Jelens book Microsoft Excel 2010 In Depth. You can find links to all seven posts and see the voting results in our wrap-up post of VLOOKUP Week.

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Excel: Not just for geeks

Emily Warn — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 16:46:00 GMT

Ugh. Excel. It's not as intuitive as a Word doc, and not as aesthetically pleasing as a PowerPoint presentation. If you're more creative than analytical, you might feel as though it's dry and boring and filled with numbers you'd rather not look at. However, I can tell you that after you familiarize yourself with it, it is the best tool Microsoft Office has - and extremely easy to use!

This guest post is written by Divya Bahl, a blogger for the popular site Her Campus.

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VLOOKUP Week wraps up: Vote for your favorite post

Emily Warn — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 19:56:00 GMT

VLOOKUP Week has ended. The brainchild of Excel MVP Bill Jelen, the idea inspired all things VLOOKUP, including VLOOKUP odes, haikus, vampires, and a way to track shark attacks. Setting all fun aside--Excel experts created a crazy number of useful and innovative applications of VLOOKUP in seven days.

Now Bill wants you to vote for your favorite. Top vote-getter will be named the “Great White Shark” of VLOOKUP week!

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