Excel-Expert » Excel Expert

Accidental Marketing

Excel Expert — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:29:52 +0000

Today, I went to my first 4Networking meeting and tried out my accidental “I love spreadsheets” marketing

Seemed to work really well and got me recognised, so that will be staying for a while

Our first video blog!

Excel Expert — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:39:50 +0000

It has taken us a while but here is our first ever video blog.

It is just a quick 2 minute video about some company branding that has happened by accident on the 4Networking forum.

The video was also made to test the equipment and the software so please feel free to make suggestions and comments on the content and the production

How to make a spreadsheet expire

Excel Expert — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:35:24 +0000

Liam from EverythingZing in Letchworth writes;

Hi Carl, I am looking for a macro that makes the excel file either self-delete or expire after a set period of time. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

First of all, it is not possible to make an Excel file self delete, Microsoft put in all sorts of safe guards to stop macros being used in bad ways, however there are ways we can make the functionality expire.

Have a look at this macro

Sub MyMacro()

ExpireDate = #1/1/2011#

If Now() < ExpireDate Then

‘Your macro goes here

End if

End Sub

What this macro does is it checks today’s data against a predefined date, in this case 1st Jan 2011. If the day the macro is run is before the predefined date, then your macro will run as normal, if not it won’t.

There are some variations you might want to try. Try adapting the macro so it runs when the spreadsheet opens, that way you can use the macro to instantly close the file back down again if it is opened after the expiration date.

Cell colors won’t change

Excel Expert — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 09:58:14 +0000

Our first problem today is from Joe in Indianapolis, and he writes;

I have sheets that won’t show the colors that I have formatted into them. When I go a cell, it is white. When I open the color palette the color I chose for that cell is highlighted with the box around the color that is supposed to be there. When I try to color the same cell with the same or different color, nothing happens. It’s as though the color generator is turned off. Help, help. and help.

The most likely cause of this is that the accessibility settings on your PC are wrong. Try this

In Windows click “Start” and go to the “Control Panel”
Go to “Accessibility Options”
Select the “Display” tab and unselect the “Use High Contrast” check box
Click “OK” to close the “Accessibility Options” dialog box and to save your settings

If you go back to your spreadsheet you should be able to format the cell color’s as normal.

Let ne know how you get on with this Joe.

Excel custom number formatting

Excel Expert — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:12:03 +0000

Do you want to enter data in to cells in a specific format but Excel won’t let you?

In this tutorial we will look at formatting cells to accept data in specific formats without Excel mucking them up.

This tutorial is broken down in to two parts. The first details how to apply the formatting and the second part is a guide to the formatting codes that you can use.

Part 1 – Applying the formatting

Step 1 – Select the cell or cells that you want to apply your custom number formatting to.

Step 2 – Right click the cells and select “Format cells…”

Step 3 – Under the “Number” tab select the “Custom” option from the list

Note – At this point you will see a wide variety of pre-made custom formats and when you click on one a bit of sample data will be shown at the top.

You may find a pre-defined format is similar to the one that you want. Select the one that is nearest and try editing under the “Type:” option.

Step 4 – Type the formatting into the “Type” field and click on OK

Part 2 – Custom formatting code

Each custom format is made up of a code letters and symbols which can be a bit confusing to the first time user, so below is a handy guide to how the most common codes are used, along with some examples of their use.

Number codes

General	General number format or no formatting
#	Represents where the number should appear in a string of other characters. Example – entering ‘100’ into a cell formatted as ‘A##A’ would display as ‘A100A’
0	(Zero) – Place holder for 0’s needed to fill out the padding. Example – if you set the custom formatting to ‘0000’ and entered ‘1’ into the cell it would read ‘0001’, ‘10’ would read as ‘0010’ etc. Alternatively, to ensure a number was always displayed to decimal places, you can format a cell as ‘#.00’ – Now when ‘8.9’ is entered it will be displayed as ‘8.90’
?	Place holder for insignificant 0’s. Inserts a space instead of any insignificant 0’s. Example – format two cells above each over, as ‘0.0?’ and enter ‘1.10’ in the top one and ‘1.11’ in the lower one. If you look at the top cell, the 0 has been replaced with a space. This is different from the normally rounding down process where the number just moves move to the right to eliminate the gap. Using this method the decimal place in both cells remains in line with each other.
.	(Decimal place) Indicates where a decimal place should appear in a number. Example – formatting a cell as ‘#.’ and entering the number ‘111’ would be displayed as ‘111.’
%	Converts the number to a percentage by multiplying by 100 and adding the ‘%’ character
,	(Comma) Used to break numbers down in readable numbers. Example – Cell formatted as ‘#,###,###’ would display ‘1000000’ as ‘1,000,000’

Text Codes

$ – + / ( ) : space	These will be displayed inside the number. Note to display other characters either put them in quotation marks or put a backslash(\) before them. Example, format a cell as ‘(#)’ and brackets will appear around anything entered in to that cell. Format it as ‘\A#’ and the letter ‘A’ will appear before anything entered in to that cell (‘1000’ would be displayed as ‘A1000’)
\	See above
“text”	This will display any text entered between the quotation marks. Example, a cell formatted as ‘“Test “#’, will display ‘Test 1000’ when ‘1000’ is entered in to it
*	This will repeat the character to the right of this code, to fill the column width. Example, if you format a cell as ‘#*>‘ and entered ‘100’ it would be displayed as ‘100>>>>>>>‘ with the number of >‘s displayed being dependent on the width of that column.
_	(Underscore) Creates a space in the cell the width of the character to the right. Example, a cell formatted as ‘#_)’ will display the number entered with a gap to the right of it, the width of the ‘)’ character. Great when trying to line up positive numbers with negative numbers enclosed in parentheses.
@	This is a text placeholder for the text entered in to a cell. Example, if you enter the text ‘is a’ into a cell that is formatted ‘”This “@”Test”’ it would be displayed as ‘This is a test’

Date codes

When a date is displayed in Excel it is broken down in to its component parts (days, months and years) and each of these can be displayed differently depending on how we format them

m	Month as a number (1 to 12)
mm	Month as a number but with leading zeros (01 to 12)
mmm	Short version of month in text (Jan to Dec)
mmmm	Full version of month in text (January to December)
d	Day as a number (1 to 31)
dd	Day as a number but with leading zeros (01 to 31)
ddd	Short version of the day in text (Sun to Sat)
dddd	Full version of the day in text (Sunday to Saturday)
yy	Year in a 2 digit format (e.g. year 2010 would be 10)
yyyy	Year in a 4 digit format

Time codes

As with dates, times are broken down in to their component parts (hours, minutes and seconds) and each of these can be formatted separately before being displayed.

h	Hours as a number (0 to 23)
hh	Hours as a number but with leading zeroes (00 to 23)
m	Minutes as a number (0 to 59)
mm	Minutes as a number but with leading zeros (00 to 59)
s	Seconds as a number (0 to 59)
ss	Seconds as a number but with leading zeros (00 to 59)
AM/PM	(or am/pm) Displays if AM or PM time

Miscellaneous codes

Colors

To display the cells in different colors you can use BLACK], [BLUE], [CYAN], [GREEN], [MEGENTA], [RED], [WHITE], [YELLOW]

Alternatively you can use [COLOR n] where n is 1 to 56 of the Excel color palette.

Conditions

It is possible to use the conditions <, >, =, >=, <= and <> to set up conditional formatting. For example if you used the formatting [Red] [<=100] ; [Blue] [>100]

Numbers equal or less than 100 will be displayed in red, where as anything over 100 will be displayed in blue.

Excel handy keyboard shortcuts

Excel Expert — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:23:28 +0000

There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts in Excel all peforming some very specific tasks. So which ones are useful and which ones aren’t?

In this short guide we have selected some of the handiest keyboard shortcuts, which will save you loads of time and effort.

Inserting

Inserting a row

Select a cell where you want to insert a row, then press Alt & i followed by r

Inserting a column

Select a cell where you want to insert a column, then press Alt & i followed by c

Inserting a worksheet

Press Alt & i followed by w

Moving About

Go to the next worksheet

Press Ctrl & Page Down

Go to the previous worksheet

Press Ctrl & Page Up

Open a new workbook

Press Ctrl & n

Move to any cell

Press Ctrl & g and enter the cell reference you want to jump to (e.g. G20) – Handy for quickly moving around large sheets

Move to last cell in data region

Press Ctrl & End to move to the bottom right corner of your data. This finds the last columns and rows that contain data, so the cell it jumps to may be empty, however there will be no data to the right or below this point.

Move to top, left corner (A1)

Press Ctrl & Home to return to cell A1

Selecting cells and ranges

Select all the cells on the current sheet

Press Ctrl & a

Note – This works in two ways. If you select a cell in a blank area before pressing Ctrl & a it will select the whole sheet, however if you select a cell in an area with data in, it will just select the region with the data in. (Ctrl & Shift & 8 also selects a region of data in the same way)

Selecting cells in rows and columns

Ctrl & Shift & Up Arrow – Will select the current cells and all the cells above

Ctrl & Shift & Down Arrow – Will select the current cells and all the cells below

Ctrl & Shift & Right Arrow – Will select the current cells and all the cells to the right

Ctrl & Shift & Left Arrow – Will select the current cells and all the cells to the left

Ctrl & Space – Will select the whole column

Shift & Space – Well select the whole row

Formatting

Open the format cells dialog box

Select the cells you want to format followed by Ctrl & 1

Edit cell content in cell

To edit text in the cell rather than in the formula bar, select the cell and press F2

Enter line breaks in a cell

To insert a line break in your text press Alt & Enter

Odds and sods

Insert a sum formula

Press Ctrl & = to enter =Sum() automatically

Insert today’s date

Press Ctrl & ; to enter today’s data

Excel VLOOKUP tutorial

Excel Expert — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 21:25:57 +0000

Note – Although this tutorial is based on Excel 2007, the majority of this tutorial will apply to earlier versions of Excel.

VLOOKUP stands for vertical lookup and it is a great way of finding related information in an Excel table. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to use a simple price list as an example.

In this exercise we are going to find the cost of individual items using just a formula.

The example data

Set up a spreadsheet similar to the one shown below

Fig 1 - The sample data for the VLOOKUP tutorial

In cell E3 enter the following formula

=VLOOKUP(D3,A2:B7,2,FALSE)

In cell D3, type in the name of one of the items in column A and hit enter. Cell D3 will now contain the cost of that item.

Fig 2 - The results of our VLOOKUP formula

Formula Breakdown

The formula is constructed like this

VLOOKUP(Look up value, Range of data, Results column, Range lookup)

The look up value is the value we are searching by, in our example it will be the description of one of the items listed (Screwdriver, hammer etc). We have used cell D3 in our example to hold the item we are looking for.

The range of data is the range of cells we want to search and get the results from. In our case we are searching the range A2:A7 (the descriptions), but we want the corresponding results from the range B2:B7 (the prices). As a result we enter A2:B7 as the combined range of data.

Handy tip – If you intend to copy the formula in E3 to other cells and still have it search the range A2:B7 enter this as $A$2:$B$7. So the formula reads =VLOOKUP(D3,$A$2:$B$7,2,FALSE). If you don’t Excel will adjust this range automatically in relation to where you enter the formula.

The results column is the number of the column in our range of data we want our results to come from. The range A2:B7 is made up of 2 columns, and the results we want are in the second column, so we enter the value 2.

The range lookup tells Excel if we want an exact match or an approximate match when searching. This bit sounds back to front and trips a lot of people up, enter FALSE here for an exact match, and true for an approximate match. (I have no idea why Microsoft made it that way around). We want an exact match so we entered FALSE here.

List unique values in an Excel range

Excel Expert — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:47:30 +0000

No matter what you use Excel for, you will always come across the need to generate a list of unique values from a range. Or in other words the need to get rid of duplicates in a list.

The following trick is a quick and easy way of getting a list of unique values using the “Advanced Filter” function.

In our example there are 8 names listed but only 6 of them are unique (click on images for an enlarged image)

Fig 1 - Our sample list of names

Step 1 – Select the entire column by clicking on the column letter

Step 2 – Copy the selected cells by either pressing Ctrl & C or by going to the Edit drop down menu and selecting copy

Step 3 – Find a spare area of the worksheet to work in, or select an empty sheet and paste the data in to it.

Fig 3 - Our cells pasted in to a spare area

Step 4 – Select one of the cells you just pasted in to place

Step 5 – In the Data menu select Filter > Advanced Filter. In the 2007 ribbon, go to the Data tab and click on the Advanced button in the “Sort & Filter” section.

Step 6 – Select if you want to sort the list in its current place or in to another location. As we already have the original list, select the first option.

Fig 4 - The advanced filter window

Step 7 – Click the “Unique records only” option and click OK

Fig - 5Our sorted list

You now have a list free of duplicates containing only unique values.