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.

  • Yesterday

First and Last Dates in Excel

The MIN and MAX functions are useful as for returning the first and last dates in a range. They have conditional versions as well MINIFS and MAXIFS which allow you to find the earliest and latest dates based on a condition.

  • Jul 1

Flexible Arrow Format in a Cell in Excel

Sometimes you like to point to a cell from the cell on the left using something like ===>. Here is an easy way to automate the length of the arrow based on the width of the cell.

  • Jun 24

Extracting Dates with XLOOKUP

One issue you may find with dates when extracting from a look up table is that an empty date field generates a zero. You can avoid that with a simple formula adjustment.

  • Jun 17

Creating a Random Number in Excel

Excel has a couple of functions that will generate a random number. But the problem is they are volatile. The number changes when Excel calculates. Here’s a technique to generate a random number that doesn’t change.

  • Jun 10

Selecting a Locked Cell in Excel

When you protect a sheet in Excel there is a setting to stop users from selecting locked cells. This means when the sheet is protected, they can’t use the keyboard or mouse to select a locked cell. But you can still select a locked cell in a protected sheet – see how.

  • Jun 3

The only time to use SUMIF

I no longer teach the SUMIF function. I teach the SUMIFS function as it provides more solutions because it handles multiple criteria. The two functions differ in their argument sequence which can be confusing when switching between them. Rather than learning both, it is easier to learn the SUMIFS function. There is however one time when the SUMIF function is shorter and easier to use than SUMIFS.

  • May 27

Flexible SUMIFS Function

The SUMIFS function is a conditional sum function that allows you to handle multiple conditions. Here is a technique to handle the situation where a condition maybe blank.

  • May 20

Alphanumeric Sort in Excel

If you have ever sorted codes like A1 and A100 you have found that Excel’s standard sort doesn’t usually provide the required sort sequence. Here’s a solution.

  • May 13

Yet Another Blank Cell Solution

When you link to an empty cell Excel it displays as zero. The same happens when you filter a list using the FILTER function. Blank cells display as zeroes. Here’s how to stop that.

  • May 6

Different Colours for Positive and Negatives in an Excel Column Chart

A recent webinar query requested different colours for the columns if they were positive or negative. Here is one technique to achieve that.

  • Apr 29

Unhiding Sheets is Now Easier in Excel

Not sure when this change happened but it is now much easier to unhide multiple sheets in Excel.

  • Apr 22

Excel Two Column Lookup – Part 2

In the previous post I showed how to use XLOOKUP to do a two-column lookup. See the link below for the previous post. This time we will see how to do the two column lookup using Power Query.