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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 >>

How to Use VLOOKUP’s Range Lookup Feature

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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 >>

How to Write a Nested IF Statement in Excel

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Writing a Nested IF Statement is widely considered a rite of passage for beginning Excel users who are looking to become more advanced.  The first time I used this technique was during my new employee training, right before I became a business analyst in management consulting.  The overall concept of writing a Nested IF is ... 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 >>

Top Mistakes Made When Using INDEX MATCH

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INDEX MATCH Not Working?  The following article provides the most likely causes of your problems with using INDEX MATCH. If you're an advanced user of Excel, you've likely already made the switch from VLOOKUP to INDEX MATCH because of the several advantages that INDEX MATCH provides.  Within Excel, INDEX MATCH is one of the most Continue Reading >>

How to Write an Excel Criteria Statement That Links to a Specific Cell

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I generally give Excel a lot of credit for being an intuitive and easy to learn tool.  However, writing criteria statements that link to cells is probably one of the most un-intuitive aspects of formula writing in Excel.  This is a very common mistake that occurs and therefore, should always be error-checked whenever you are ... 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 >>