Working days made easy.
You can work out the date so many days away in Excel, by just doing one date plus the number of days. This works because Excel treats dates as numbers (as long as you have actual dates, and not just text that looks like a date). However, if you are trying to calculate with working […]
DAY, MONTH, and YEAR functions in Excel.
There are formulas in Excel to take a date, and return the day of the month, the month of the year, or the year itself. Of course, you can also format a date, so it stays as a date, but only displays the day, month, or year, but sometimes you need just the number and […]
Show as text with TEXT function
The TEXT function allows you to show a number (or date, or some other value) as text. But why would you want to do that? Well, sometimes you want to join numbers with text and that only works if both of them are text, so we change the number to text to join it. In […]
Trim, clean, and proper.
Cleaning your data is often an important pre step to actually using it to make decisions. Three useful functions in Excel to help do that are TRIM, CLEAN, and PROPER. TRIM(text) The TRIM function will remove all spaces from text except for single spaces between words. You would be surprised how often people put extra […]
Get text from text – using Excel text functions.
Excel has a lot of functions that can deal with text. The first three I will introduce you to are Left, mid, and right. These are functions in Excel for pulling bits of texts out of other texts. For example, if you had an address that has the post code on the end, after a […]
Scroll left and right!?
You can scroll sideways using the mouse wheel. Just hold down Ctrl + Shift and start scrolling. Down goes right, and up goes left. Remember you can also use Ctrl and the arrow keys, and end and home to jump around your spreadsheet much quicker than scrolling too. Ctrl and arrow keys are one of […]
Search and Find – same same, but different.
Search and Find are two similar functions in Excel. Their syntax is the same (find_text,within_text,[start_num]) Basically, what do you want to find, what text are you looking in, what number character to start at. The first two inputs are required, the third is optional. If you don’t specify then it will start looking at the […]
Joining together with CONCAT or TEXTJOIN.
Joining cells into one can be done in a couple of ways in Excel. The CONCAT function in Excel joins things together. CONCAT is short for concatenate. There is actually a concatenate function as well, and this does exactly the same thing, but it is an older function, and if you have a newish version […]
Switching it up with the SWITCH function
Switch is a useful function in Excel, that is a natural extension of writing about IFS last week. While it can handle up to 126 pairs, there are far better options if you have that many! SWITCH is probably a bit easier to understand than IFS but it only does exact matching (there is a […]
A bit iffy… how to use IFS.
You can nest if statements inside each other, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should! A better option is to use IFS. This allows you to specify conditions and what you want to do when those conditions are met, in a way that is much easier than nesting if statements inside each other. […]