Articles

Although Excel ships with many conditional formatting "presets", these are limited. A more powerful way to apply conditional formatting is with formulas, because formulas allow you to apply rules that use more sophisticated logic. This article shows 10 examples, including how to highlight rows, column differences, missing values, and how to build Gantt charts and search boxes with conditional formatting.

Are nested IFs evil? Are they necessary? Are there alternatives? The answer is Yes! This in-depth article explores nested IF formulas in detail, with lots of tips, and several alternatives.

MOD is nerdy, but cool. If you've ever struggled to create a more complex formula in Excel, you'll like this one. It shows you how to build a more complex formula step-by-step, without going crazy.

Excel has the ability to use a custom template for all new workbooks. If you find yourself making the same changes to new workbooks (changing row height, font size, zoom, etc.) a default custom template can save you time and trouble.

Does cell A1 contain "apple"? This is a surprisingly tricky problem in Excel. In this article, we look at several options, based on the functions FIND, SEARCH, ISNUMBER, and COUNTIF.

Shortcuts work great in the Mac version of Excel, but there are differences you should know about. This article explains the 5 key differences you need to be aware of to work productively with Excel shortcuts on a Mac.

We asked users how important Excel shortcuts are to them and also about their favorite shortcuts. This is what we learned...

Your report is due in an hour. You're working along in Excel, and suddenly you notice you can no longer move around properly. You press the arrow keys, but instead of the cursor moving to another cell, the entire worksheet seems to be moving about. WTF?! Before you panic, and call IT to tell them Excel is broken, check to see if Scroll Lock is to blame. Read below to learn how.

If you've ever wondered whether learning Excel formulas is worth your time, this list is for you. Formulas are the glue that hold spreadsheets together all over the world, and your skill with them can help you in many ways.

Although VLOOKUP is a pretty simple function, there is plenty that can go wrong. Quickly learn more than 20 things you should know about VLOOKUP to make your experience pleasant and profitable.

Many users aren't aware of it, but VLOOKUP will use approximate match mode by default. This can be a disaster because VLOOKUP can return a totally incorrect result. Read below to learn how match modes work in VLOOKUP, and how to avoid this dangerous problem.

If you've ever tried to apply conditional formatting with a formula, you know the hardest part is making sure the formula actually works. Here's an easy way to test the formula, before you use it in a rule.

How do you figure out what formula to use? A teardown of 5 good formulas you can use to highlight dates based on a common month and year value using conditional formatting.

In this article, we look at some cool ways that you can use Excel's conditional formatting feature to quickly visualize important data.

In this article, we take a short tour of some "unconventional" pivot tables you probably haven't seen before. These are interesting pivot tables created to analyze something other than sales data.

This article is for those of you who don't get pivot tables. Maybe you tried pivot tables once, and didn't see what the big deal was, or maybe you got frustrated when a pivot table wouldn't behave. They can be that way.

Many Excel experts believe that Pivot Tables are the single most powerful tool in Excel. This article provides more than 20 tips you should know to work productively with Excel Pivot Tables.

In this article, we take a look at a simple model that calculates the time that could be saved by doing a task or activity with more skill. The goal is to visualize whether it makes sense to invest in getting better at a skill.

A list and description of just over 50 important Excel shortcuts you should know if you spend a lot of time in Excel. This is a summarized version of the more than 200 shortcuts that are available in Excel for both Windows and Mac platforms.

Does it ever bother you that the ribbon sits up there at the top of the workbook, smugly hogging a bunch of space while you toil away in your (smaller) worksheet below?