If you’re borrowing or saving money, and want to compare rates, perhaps perform some What If analysis, there are built in function in Excel which can quickly help you PMT() The main one is PMT() This function takes a value, a rate and a ‘number of periods’ value and gives you the repayment. There are also Read More
Can you believe that with all the articles I’ve written to this site, I’ve yet to do one specific to Word? Which is ironic, given I write and publish most of the articles from Word.
There is of course a logical reason for that – it’s just not a tool I use as much as other applications.
And, you’ll be comforted to know, this article isn’t a complete departure from my more frequent Excel related articles!
(I’ve written the article based on using Word, but the exact same approach is valid for Powerpoint as well)
Nice quick one.
If you want to use a shape on a chart, in place of columns and bars, it’s possible to do this in Excel.
It’s not obvious how to do it, but is very simple and very quick.
Create your chart as normal. Once you’re happy, elsewhere on your screen, create the shape you want to use. Read More
Update: Feb 2016 – If you’re using Excel 2016, be sure to check out the new Waterfall Chart Type, which makes waterfall charts a breeze. Learn more here
Waterfall Charts are another one of those charts that’s much harder to put together than it should be, particularly as they’re a great way to understand the sequential impact of positive & negative values to a total.
That being said, they’re really not as bad as to put together as they’re sometime perceived to be. As with most of the chart techniques I’ve demonstrated, it’s really about tricking excel to show the bits of data you want it to show.
We’re going to go through the process to create the below chart – a simple income & expenditure chart for a shop.
I’m using excel 2013, but the approach is almost identical for previous versions of Excel
One of the most common questions I hear, is around how to manage duplicate values in Excel.
I’ve already covered off how to remove duplicate values in this post.
I personally feel the ability to remove and highlight duplicates should grouped together, but whilst removing duplicates forms part its own ‘feature’, highlighting duplicates forms part of the wider Conditional Formatting functionality.
Since Excel 2007, highlighting duplicates has been very straightforward, with a pre-defined option to enabling it. So it’s this approach I will cover in this post. It can still be achieved in 2003 using a simple formula, but hopefully by now everyone is using 2007+ Read More
Changing the formatting, or removing completely, the borders from Excel Slicers and Timelines isn’t obvious – read on to find out how Read More
Anyone who’s used Excel in earnest for any length of time – ie 2003 and earlier – probably remembers having to create a VBA add-in to tackle the removal of duplicate values – or sometimes a COUNTIF() function would suffice for smaller jobs.
I always used the superb ‘The Duplicate Master’ add-in
(Which can still be found here – though the availability of the link seems to come & go)
Whilst such add-ins still have a place, offering rich features, for basic day-to-day removal of duplicates, Excel now includes this functionality built-in – and has done since Office 2007.
It’s this built-in functionality that we’ll cover in this post. Read More
Learn how to create a combined Stacked, Clustered Chart in Excel. One of the trickier charts to get to create in Excel – but is certainly possible. Read More
Today I want to do a quick page on using Hlookups in Excel. Hlookups work in much the same way as a Vlookup (H being Horiztonal Lookup rather than V being Vertical Lookup) but often people forget about it or afraid to use it, instead favouring a more complex approach to the problem. For Read More
Line charts are a great way of showing the trend of information over time. I often use them to show both the historic actual, but also the forward forecast. Sometimes, however, it’s not always clear looking at a chart where your ‘actual’ ends and your forecast begins. I like to add an indicator showing me Read More