Personally, I think the Excel ribbon was a huge improvement over the earlier menu option, as it made it more user-friendly for people to find useful options in one place. While it wasn’t possible to customize the Excel ribbon in the initial versions, from Excel 2010 onwards, Excel allowed users to make their own customizations to the ribbon. With customizations in Excel ribbon, you can create your own Tabs that can include your most used commands, you can reorder the default tab/group placements, and you can also hide some of the tabs in case you don’t use them in your work....

She did some scoring in Excel and created Harvey balls using conditional formatting. She wanted to display the Harvey Balls as well as the score together. She also wanted to increase the font size of the Harvey Balls only and not the font size of the score value. Below is the image she sent me along with the query: The first thought that came to my mind was to selectively increase the size of the Harvey Balls only....

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a calendar in Excel that automatically updates when you change the month or the year value. I will show you the exact process to create the interactive monthly and yearly calendar, and I also have these as downloadable Excel files, so that you can use them offline. You can print these calendar templates and manually create the schedule on paper....

As a part of it, I had to make sure my reports were easy to read and also take less screen space (apparently, clients hate scrolling back and forth). And the functionality of rotating text came in useful in such reports. It’s especially useful when you have a bigger heading and a small number (as shown below). Here, headers in Row 1 take less space as these are at an angle (as compared to when they are horizontal)....

While it works as expected in most of the cases, in some cases, it can be a little counterproductive. One such area is when Excel decides to round-off numbers (arghhh). In this tutorial, I will show you how to take control and stop Excel from rounding numbers. Why Excel Rounds Off Numbers? Here are some possible reasons why Excel might be rounding off numbers: Now the table look at each of these scenarios and how you can stop Excel from rounding numbers in each case...

While you don’t have to care about the active cell when you’re working on the worksheet, it’s an important thing to know when working with VBA in Excel. Proper use of the active cell in Excel VBA can help you write better code. In this tutorial, I first explained what is an active cell, and then show you some examples of how to use an active cell in VBA in Excel....

If you want to apply superscript or subscript format to the text in a cell, you may not find anything for it in the ribbon. This is one of those things where you need to go a level deep to make it happen. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to apply the superscript and subscript format in Excel. Superscript Format in Excel A superscript format is needed when you want to have 1st, 2nd, 3rd with the alphabets in the superscript format....

I regularly use to-do lists and calendars to plan my days in advance. In this post, I am sharing an Excel calendar template that you can use in Excel or even take a printout and stick it at home or at your workplace. While it’s easy to create a static calendar in Excel, I have used the power of Excel formulas to create a dynamic calendar template that will update based on the selections you make....

What is Compound Interest? Let me take a simple example to explain it. Suppose you invest USD 1000 in a bank account that promises to give you 10% return at the end of the year. So at the end of year 1, you get USD 1100 (1000+100). Now since you didn’t have any immediate use of the money, you let it stay in the account. And the bank did its part and added 10% at the end of the year....

Sometimes when working with data in Excel, you may have a need to move rows and columns in the dataset. For example, in the below dataset, I want to quickly move the highlighted row to the top. Now, are you thinking of copying this row, inserting the copied row where you want it, and then deleting it? If yes – well that’s one way to do this. But there is a lot faster way to move rows and columns in Excel....

Or if you’re a keyboard person, you can hold the shift key and move the cursor to make the selection. But both of these methods work when you want to select a contiguous range of cells. But what if you want to select non-adjacent cells in Excel? You can do that too… it’s not as easy as selecting the adjacent cells, but it’s still quite easy. In this Excel tutorial, I will show you some simple ways to select non-adjacent cells in Excel....

Usually, the names are either in the ‘First Name Last Name’ format (such as Joe Davis or Sumit Bansal). In some specific situations, you may want the names data to be formatted as Last Name, First Name (i.e., last name followed by a comma and then the first name) In this tutorial, I will show you how to switch the first and the last name in Excel with a comma in between (when you have your data in the First Name Last Name format)...

This is extremely valuable in many situations as we will see in the examples later in this tutorial. To give you a simple example, suppose you have a list of grades in Excel and you want to highlight all those students who have scored an A. Now, if I ask you to do this manually, you will check each student’s grade and if it’s an A, you’ll highlight it, and if it isn’t, then you’ll leave it as is....

You either need to know the keyboard shortcut, or use the methods that are not very straightforward. And there are a lot of symbols that many people need to insert regularly, such as the degree symbol, cent symbol, delta symbol, etc. Note: In this tutorial, I have shown all the methods for the Greek Capital Letter Delta symbol (Δ). You can use the same methods for other delta symbols as well....

And if you’re thinking that you can do that by easily combining the two cells by using the concatenate formula or the & sign, you’ll find out that it doesn’t work. I have tried to use the & sign to combine the cells that contain date and time, and the resulting value is not in the expected format. In this tutorial, I will show you a couple of ways to quickly combine date and time values in Excel....

If you work with Excel, you undoubtedly have been asked to create summaries of your work. Sales reports, invoices, forecasts, schedules, you name it. You know what all these documents have in common? They look great in PDF form. You know what else? Management loves PDFs! Convert Excel to PDF In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use Excel VBA to convert all kinds of Excel objects to PDFs: I’m going to present each of the macros with some commentary....

When to use Excel AND Function Excel AND function can be used when you want to check multiple conditions. What it Returns It returns TRUE if all the conditions evaluate to TRUE, else it returns a FALSE (Note: it would return FALSE even if one condition is FALSE). Syntax =AND(logical1, [logical2],…) Input Arguments logical1 – the first condition that you want to evaluate for TRUE or FALSE. [logical2] – (Optional) This is the second condition that you want to evaluate for TRUE or FALSE....

Below is the complete written tutorial, in case you prefer reading over watching a video. Conditional Formatting in Excel can be a great ally in while working with spreadsheets. A trick as simple as the one to highlight every other row in Excel could immensely increase the readability of your data set. And it is as EASY as PIE. Suppose you have a dataset as shown below: Let’s say you want to highlight every second month (i....

But do you know that you can also copy the column width? Excel allows you to copy cells and paste selectively (such as only pasting the values or formatting or column width) In this short tutorial, I will show you how to use Paste Special options to copy and paste column widths in Excel. I will also give you the keyboard shortcut to copy column width in Excel. So let’s get started!...

Using it, you can create a drop-down in a cell that will show you all the pre-populated options that you can choose from. It saves time as you can simply choose from the list instead of entering it manually, and it also helps you avoid errors such as misspelled words. One common drop-down list that is often needed is a Yes and No drop-down list. Once you create this Yes/No drop-down list, you can quickly choose to fill the value yes or no in a cell by simply selecting it from the drop-down....