What will you do better in Excel next year? Do you have any Excel bad habits that you’ll break? Are there any Excel skill areas that you’ll improve?
Based on the questions that I see in the Excel newsgroups and forums, lots of people could resolve to do one or more of these things:

Save your [...]

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas, and with any luck, you’re taking this entire week off. You might still be full of turkey and eggnog, so I’ll just give you a small Excel tip today – something that’s easy to digest.
Create Quick Excel Grand Totals
Instead of entering each SUM function individually, you can use [...]

Merry Christmas! I hope you’re relaxing today, and spending time with friends and family.
Here’s an Excel Christmas tree for you to enjoy, if you have Excel 2007. The lights on the tree are created with conditional formatting icons, and will change colour if you press the F9 key, to recalculate the worksheet.
You can download the [...]

A bit of Excel programming can help us save some time and paper. Our goal is to stop people from printing an order form if they forgot to enter a customer name.
Last week, you created a macro to show a message if the customer name was missing in an order form. Today, you’ll make a [...]

How long is your attention span? It’s a short work week, so let’s start it off with a couple of quick Excel tips. And when I say “Quick,” I mean, “Don’t blink, or you’ll miss them.”
I recorded a few quick Excel tips, and posted them in the Excel Quick Tips playlist on my Contextures YouTube [...]

Keeping Excel users on the right path is a big job, but somebody’s got to do it! Last week we created an Excel message box in an order form, to remind users to select a customer name.

However, we don’t want the message to appear in every order form – it should only show if the [...]

Should you spend extravagantly this Christmas, or go cheap, or spend somewhere in the middle?
In Excel, you can use Scenarios to store several versions of a budget, and compare the results. Let’s set up a worksheet where we can compare three scenarios for holiday spending.
Set Up the Worksheet
The first step is to set up the [...]

In Excel 2003 and earlier versions, you can use an Advanced Filter to remove duplicates. In Excel 2007, there’s a new command on the Ribbon to make it easier to remove duplicates from a list.
Be careful with the Excel 2007 Remove Duplicates feature though – it really removes the duplicates. If you use an Advanced [...]

Unfortunately, no one has found a way to zap users with a mild shock from the keyboard, so we have to rely on messages to help people do the right things in Excel.
You can create messages without Excel VBA. For example, you can add a comment to a cell,

or use a data validation input message.

To [...]

Let it snow! One of the advantages of working from home in Canada, is that you don’t have to go out in rush hour, on snowy days. I can sit in my office, basking in the glow of the computer monitor, mesmerized by the flickering of the modem lights.
But eventually I’ll have to go out [...]