Update to MBA Excel Homework Tracker

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 Course Review: Yoda Learning – Become an Excel Ninja

Overall Summary Being an Excel blogger, I've taken a number of Excel courses throughout my career.  As my proficiency increased, both my need and interest to take Excel courses began to diminish over time.  Therefore, when Rishabh Bhandari from Yoda Learning reached out to me to review an Excel course, I took it more from the perspective Continue Reading >>

How to Use Power Query for Pivot Table Data Analysis

The following is a guest post from Rishabh Bhandari, co-founder of Yoda Learning, a site that helps working professionals become faster and better in Microsoft office suite using high-quality video tutorials.  Before founding Yoda Learning, Rishabh worked with an Education-focused Private Equity fund in Mumbai, India.   Continue Reading >>

Excel Template: Histogram Builder with Adjustable Bin Sizes

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 Create a Normally Distributed Set of Random Numbers in Excel

Whether you're building a model or trying to simulate a scenario within your analysis, at some point in your Excel career, you're going to need to use a randomized set of data.  If you need to create a purely random set of numbers, with no specific constraints or parameters, you can just use the RAND ... Continue Reading >>

VLOOKUP Quick Reference Guide From Microsoft

If you're brand new to VLOOKUP or haven't used the formula in a while, the following quick reference guide is a great resource to have handy.  It's created by the folks at Microsoft, so you know it's legitimate. Reference Guide Summary The quick reference guide is in PDF format and is three pages long.  It goes into ... Continue Reading >>

How to Use VLOOKUP’s Range Lookup Feature

The vast majority of Excel users have never used VLOOKUP's range lookup feature.  Most Excel users familiar with the VLOOKUP formula are just conditioned to know that, when they get to the range lookup option portion of the VLOOKUP syntax, they should just put in the word "FALSE" because they want an exact match.  This ... Continue Reading >>