Harness the power of the suite of Text functions, such as LEFT, RIGHT, MID, FIND, LEN, TEXT, and REPLACE, and you'll be an unstoppable force. In this post, experiment with these functions and build your skills in finding, extracting, and changing text in worksheet cells. ...( read more )
When you bring data from other sources into Excel, it may not look the way you'd like -- numbers might have come in as text so that you can't sum them, dates might not be dates at all...you get the idea. Here's how to clean things up so your spreadsheet looks and works right. ...( read more...
Ever wonder where the character count option is in Excel? It doesn't exist, at least not in the same sense as Word's word count feature. However, Excel does have a nifty little function, LEN, that lets you quickly count the number of characters in a cell. Check it out! ...( read more )
How much time do you spend in Excel doing basically the same thing over and over again, like calculating "growth versus prior year?" My bet is you spend a lot of time doing that sort of thing. Maybe even the majority of your time. The reason for that is that Excel formulas are not "portable...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...