Most of you are probably already familiar with the Format Painter. It’s the paint brush button near the left end of the ribbon in Excel, Word, and Outlook. For those of you who haven’t used it before, it lets you copy the formatting from one place and apply somewhere else. Just select the cell or […]

If need to know the number of days between two dates, that is very easy to do in Excel. Just subtract one date from the other. For example if cell A2 has an invoice date in it of 1/1/2015 and cell B2 has a date paid of 1/30/2015, then you could enter use the formula […]

Do you ever get tired of removing or fixing a cell’s borders after you copy something in Excel? It’s really frustrating to discover that your last minute copy placed some random cell borders in your otherwise neatly formatted spreadsheet, or that the cells you pasted into the middle of a table have no borders even […]

A few months ago I explained how to use the Excel functions Left, Mid, or Right to to pull information from the beginning, middle, or end of another cell’s contents. That prompted this question from a Youtube viewer: I’ve got a slightly different challenge: I need to extract numbers from a single cell which reads […]

Usually we think of adding numbers on a spreadsheet, but sometimes you just need to count the items in a list. If you have tried to use Excel’s COUNT() function you may or may not have gotten the results you wanted. There are two very similar functions in Excel: COUNT() and COUNTA(). The difference between […]

Have you ever found yourself entering the same text or the same formula on multiple tabs of an Excel workbook? You don’t have to go to all that trouble. You can enter text, numbers, of formulas on multiple tabs at the same time. Just click on the first tab you want to use then hold […]

Charts and can help show trends that are hard to pick out of a large table of numbers. But often you need the detail that is on those numbers. What if you could have both at the same time? That is where Sparklines come in. They are mini charts that fit within a cell in […]

If you need to enter text that is too wide for your column, and you don’t want to split it into several rows, text wrapping is your answer. When you turn on text wrapping, long pieces of text wrap around to the next line within a cell and the cell height  adjusts automatically. You may […]

When you want to see one formula, just click in that cell and look in the formula bar. But have you ever found yourself going to cell after cell to check all of your formulas? In that situation, it would be a lot better to be able to see all the formulas on your spreadsheet. […]

In Excel, the other cells that are referred to in a formula are called precedents. Conversely, the cell containing the formula is a dependent because it needs the cell containing the data to complete its function. I’ve written before about the ability to trace precedents and dependents, But I recently learned two keyboard shortcuts that […]