Excel Yourself Blog

Helping You Excel Yourself

In these posts I share useful tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the most out of Excel.

  • Jan 7, 2026

Excel Applies Some Focus

  • Neale Blackwood
  • 0 comments

Excel has a new feature call a focus cell. It is useful for large and or wide spreadsheets.

  • Dec 31, 2025

Excel SEARCH and Wildcards

  • Neale Blackwood
  • 0 comments

Excel has recently added three regex functions to handle text patterns, but did you know the old SEARCH function can use wildcards?

  • Dec 24, 2025

Adding a Dotted Line for the Budget in Excel

  • Neale Blackwood
  • Charts
  • 0 comments

When you are charting the whole year in a line chart you might want to show the actuals up to a point and then the budget from then on. The budget could also be a dotted line. Here’s a way to do that.

  • Dec 17, 2025

TRANSPOSE and TOROW Functions in Excel

  • Neale Blackwood
  • 0 comments

When you have a vertical list that you need to make horizontal you can use the TRANSPOSE function to switch it. There is an alternative function that gives you extra options.

  • Dec 10, 2025

Shortcut to Delete a Word

This technique works best in Word, but you can also use it in Excel. There is a keyboard shortcut to delete the current word.

  • Dec 3, 2025

Better MROUND Function for Excel

The MROUND function gives inconsistent results. Here is a replacement custom function that provides consistent results.

  • Nov 26, 2025

Bullet Points in Excel

Bullet points are more a Word or PowerPoint feature, but you can use them in Excel. There are a few tricks required to use them though.

  • Nov 19, 2025

Macro to Set Sparkline Axis to Zero

Reading time: 2 mins When creating sparkline charts in Excel one of the problems is that the vertical axis doesn’t always start at zero. It is a manual process to reset the vertical access to zero and a macro can make it much quicker and easier.

  • Nov 13, 2025

Free Macro Webinar Recording

  • Neale Blackwood
  • Macros
  • 0 comments

Learn how to record macros as well as the tips, tricks and traps. This a recording of a live webinar from November 2025. The live session rating, based on over 50 responses, was 92%!

  • Nov 12, 2025

Excel FizzBuzz Challenge

I was recently reminded of a basic programming challenge called FizzBuzz. Here is my Excel solution.

  • Nov 5, 2025

Handling Extra Columns in Excel Power Query

When you import a CSV file using Power Query any extra rows are automatically included. Unfortunately, extra columns are NOT included. Here’s how to fix that.

  • Oct 29, 2025

Excel Strikethrough Format Appearing

You may have started to see the strikethrough format displaying in Excel and wondered why. It means the formula’s values haven’t been updated and a calculation is required.