As both an engineer and a marketer I have found myself working a great deal in and with Microsoft Excel. Over time I have learned many tricks and workflows that are useful, some of which have saved me hours. The best resource for picking up new tricks has been friends and colleagues because they have […]

Paste As Value When pasting excel data the default option is to paste the contents of the cell. For formulas that means the actual formula, and not the result of the formula, will be pasted. Often a pasted fomula will cause an error or simply reference the wrong location (absolute functions with the $ included

When inputting lists into Excel there is often a need to have a unique instance of every list item. For example item numbers or product names are very important to avoid confusion.  Sequential serial numbers can be done with a formula but logical numbers (first digit denotes product category, second digit is subcategory, third and

Databases by nature are intended to hold a lot of information, often they contain entries for different instances of very similar information. This means when even a small thing changes it has the potential to be a replicated change in a number of areas. Of course there are also regular reports that are output in

For complicated excel formulas there are often “What-If” scenarios. Questions such as “How many do we have to sell to make $1,000,000” and “How long until we run out of inventory”. Excel has a helpful built in tool that lets you define what you want the outcome of a formula to be. By showing excel

There are two easy ways to highlight every other row or column in a worksheet, which makes it much easier to read mind-numbing rows of data.  Mind-Numbing hard to follow rows The first method is to highlight the necessary cells and find “Format As Table” on the toolbar. Choose the style of table and then

One of the most useful things about Excel is that you can navigate everything without having to move to a mouse. When working in the program a lot knowing a variety of hot keys greatly reduces speed and can also help maintain focus (which we all know is required for mind-numbing data sets). An amazingly

There are tons of times where inserting an image helps make a spreadsheet of data look more professional and function much better. Getting the right image can be a bit cumbersome, but knowing the tools included can go a long ways. Built into Excel is a very useful feature that lets you take a screenshot

When adding text and headers to spreadsheets things can get tricky. Often the data in the cells below the header cell are only a few digits, but they need a lot of explanation. This can create columns that are very wide for no real reason (other than that they have long titles). There are a