December 2010

It’s frustrating when all you want to do is sum a column of times to get the total, but for some reason you end up with a random number like in the example below. Let me explain what’s going on with Excel and summing time. Since time is a concept rather than a mathematical equation, [...]

There’s a little known tool in Excel that will convert your text into speech and read your worksheet to you.  It’s called Speak Cells and not many people know about it because you won’t find it in any of the tabs on the Ribbon. It sounds like a gimmick, but it’s not just for fun [...]

An improved feature in Excel 2007 is Tables (previously known as Lists).  The purpose of an Excel Table is to aid with managing and analysing data. By storing your information in a consistent format Tables allow for easier sorting, filtering and formatting and interpretation days, weeks and months after they were created. Excel Tables have [...]

Learning how to customise a cell format in Excel allows you to not only format your data the way you want, but in some instances it can save you time. Before we dive in you need to know that despite how the text appears after you’ve set your custom cell format, the underlying value is [...]

Excel’s INDEX and MATCH functions have many uses, we’ll look at each function in isolation to understand how they work, and then we’ll use them together as an alternative to the VLOOKUP formula. Download the workbook and practice what you learn, or use it to reverse engineer the formulas for deeper understanding. How the INDEX [...]