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Update to MBA Excel Homework Tracker

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In 2012, back when I was in business school, I created a spreadsheet-based task tracker to manage my various commitments.  Because I'm somewhat of a visual design nerd, I leveraged Excel as my platform of choice because of all the detailed conditional formatting options available. It's now been more than 4 years since I created Continue Reading >>

Excel Template: Histogram Builder with Adjustable Bin Sizes

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If you work in consulting or some other profession that requires you to analyze data, sooner or later, you'll need to build a histogram.  This is because the histograms is one of the most effective methods to visualize and understand a data set.  Averages, sums, and counts are calculations that only tell you part of ... Continue Reading >>

How to Use IF ISNA to Hide VLOOKUP Errors

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When writing a series of VLOOKUP formulas, one of the annoying things is having to see the "#N/A" error after Excel has determined a lookup value is not available.  While we don't want to show any values when they are truly unavailable, from a visual design perspective, it's sometimes better just to show a blank space ... Continue Reading >>

Why You Should Be Cautious About Using Excel’s IFERROR Formula

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The IFERROR formula was designed to solve a common aesthetic problem that most of us have encountered when using Excel - when we know that there are errors in our data, but we'd prefer not to see Excel's standard error message notation.  Error messages usually consist of all caps lettering that is preceded with the "#" ... Continue Reading >>

The Eight Things You Should Always Check Whenever You Receive an Excel File

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Photo by adamr Taking over another person's Excel file always has the potential to become a difficult task.  While some people actually create documentation, consider a new user's point of view, and take the time to call out the mousetraps that you might encounter, most of the time, you'll be getting a straight file dump.  Therefore, Continue Reading >>

How to Streamline the Excel Error Checking Process: Excel’s Inspect Workbook Feature

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Checking for errors in your Excel files is always a pain.  It's generally a very manual process that takes a lot of time, with a certain level of ambiguity regarding your return on investment - you could spend hours checking for issues in your Excel file, find nothing wrong, and your only tangible benefit is ... Continue Reading >>

The Eight Most Impactful Excel Shortcuts That You Should Master

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If you've ever gone online to research improving your Excel skills, you've undoubtedly come across a post or two listing all of Excel's keyboard shortcuts.  In the latest version of Excel, Microsoft has made it easier than ever to learn shortcuts, by assigning shortcuts to nearly every function and making the discovery of the input Continue Reading >>

How to Remove Duplicate Values in Excel

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Five Ways to Find and Remove Duplicate Values in Excel For people who work with large data sets in Excel, or databases for that matter, one of the most common error checking tasks is the removal of duplicates values.  Some people refer to this process as de-duping.  The main reason this is necessary in data sets ... Continue Reading >>

15 Resume Tips for MBA Students

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Your resume is probably the most important document you will create during your two years in business school.  When I started my MBA, I actually thought my resume was in great shape.  But my initial review with a career counselor proved otherwise and made evident the time I needed to spend on this process. During fall ... Continue Reading >>