Excel Tips

Excel 2024: Sort Left to Right »

April 22, 2024

Every day, your IT department sends you a file with the columns in the wrong sequence. It would take them two minutes to change the query, but they have a six-month backlog, so you are stuck rearranging the columns every day.

Excel 2024: Sort East, Central, and West Using a Custom List »

April 19, 2024

At my last day job, we had three sales regions: East, Central, and West. The company headquarters was in the East, and so the rule was that all reports were sorted with the East region first, then Central, then West. Well, there is no way to do this with a normal sort.

Excel 2024: Set Up Your Data for Data Analysis »

April 17, 2024

Make sure to follow these rules when you set up your data for sorting, subtotals, filtering and pivot tables.

Excel 2024: Place Pictures In Cell From Local Computer »

April 15, 2024

For the last 30 years, you could use Insert, Picture in Excel. The image was added to a special drawing layer that floated above the grid. In June of 2023, that legacy experience became known as Place Over Cells. The new experience is to Place In Cell.

Excel 2024: Display Online Pictures In a Cell Using a Formula »

April 12, 2024

The IMAGE function debuted in August 2022. It is only for online images that are available through a URL.

Excel 2024: Use People to Add Interest to Your Worksheet »

April 10, 2024

Microsoft 365 subscribers now have access to 925 People in Excel. In a study conducted by YouTube, 90% of the most-watched videos have an emotive human face prominently on the title card.

Excel 2024: Add Meaning to Reports Using Data Visualizations »

April 8, 2024

Three easy visualization tools were added to the Conditional Formatting dropdown in Excel 2007: Color Scales, Data Bars, and Icon Sets.

Excel 2024: Plotting Employees on a Bell Curve »

April 3, 2024

Rather than creating a generic bell curve, how about plotting a list of employees or customers on a bell curve?

Excel 2024: Create a Bell Curve »

April 1, 2024

A bell curve is defined by an average and a standard deviation. In statistics, 68% of the population will fall within one standard deviation of the mean. 95% falls within two standard deviations of the mean. 99.73% will fall within three standard deviations of the mean.