Excel Tips


Excel 2024: Create Funnel Charts and Filled Map Charts »

March 27, 2024

In 2016, Microsoft 365 introduced Funnel charts. Early in 2017, Map Charts appeared on the Insert tab in Office 365. A Map chart shades closed regions on a map such as countries, states, counties, even zip code boundaries.


Excel 2024: Create Waterfall Charts »

March 25, 2024

For 12 years, I worked at a company doing data analysis. One of my regular tasks was to analyze the profit on sales proposals before they went out the door. I did this with a waterfall chart. For me, the waterfall chart never would have to dip below the zero axis.


Excel 2024: Show Two Different Orders of Magnitude on a Chart »

March 21, 2024

It is nearly impossible to read a chart where one series is dramatically larger than other series. In the following chart, the series for Year to Date Sales is 10 times larger than most of the monthly sales. The blue columns are shortened, and it will be difficult to see subtle changes in monthly sales.


Excel 2024: Create Interactive Charts »

March 19, 2024

It is easy to create interactive charts without using VBA. By default, if you hide rows in Excel, those rows will be hidden in the chart. The technique is to build a chart with every possible customer and then use a slicer or a filter to hide all except one of the customers.


Excel 2024: Paste New Data on a Chart »

March 18, 2024

You might be responsible for updating charts every month, week, or day. For example, in my last job, a collection of charts were updated during the month-end close process. The charts would track progress throughout the year.


Excel 2024: Create Perfect One-Click Charts »

March 15, 2024

One-click charts are easy: Select the data and press Alt+F1. What if you would rather create bar charts instead of the default clustered column chart?


Excel 2024: New Threaded Comments Allow Conversations »

March 12, 2024

Threaded comments debuted in 2018. When you insert a comment, Excel stores the comment, the author, the date, and time. When a co-worker sees your comment, they can click Reply and add a new comment to the same cell. Each set of comments lists the author, date, and time.


Excel 2024: Save Filter & Sorting in Sheet View »

March 11, 2024

Do you share a workbook with co-workers? Does you co-worker want to Filter or Sort the workbook differently than you do? Eight years ago, I was ready to strangle my co-worker Scott when he kept filtering our project list to show only his projects.


Excel 2024: Simultaneously Edit a Workbook in Microsoft 365 »

March 7, 2024

After Google's spreadsheet product began offering the ability for multiple people to edit the same worksheet, the Excel team spent over two years developing a feature that they call co-authoring. The feature was released to Office 365 customers in the summer of 2017.