In the past, I highly recommended the Excel newsgroups as a place to go for help. Earlier this month, Microsoft shut down their newsgroup servers, where thousands of people every month had gone to post their Excel questions. Over the past several years, I spent lots of time in those newsgroups, reading and answering [...]

One of the tasks you have to do quite often in Excel is to count things. For example, you could have a list of students and their test scores.

If the passing score is 50, how can you get Excel to count the number of students who passed the test?
Use COUNTIF and an Operator
The Excel COUNTIF [...]

You set up a data validation drop down list, so you can select valid items from a drop down list.

After you select a season, if you type an invalid month name in the adjacent cell, you'll see a warning message.

It's a great plan, but people are sometimes typing invalid entries in the month column, and [...]

If you sell products in several countries, you might want to show the prices in different currencies. With the conditional formatting options in Excel 2010, you can change the number format, to show a specific currency for the country that's selected.
Note: Conditional Formatting for numbers was available in Excel 2007, but didn't work correctly. (Thanks, [...]

It's finally summer, and you need to stay cool, even when you're using Excel. Here's an energy efficient way to select several rows that contain similar data, and delete them all at the same time.
Find All the Data
In the worksheet shown below, there are products sales, and a few of the records are for paper [...]

If you add pictures to an Excel workbook, the file size can increase pretty quickly. And if you're updating the pictures occasionally, perhaps for a product catalogue, you'd have to remember to update all the Excel files that have those pictures.
Instead of adding the pictures to the Excel file, Ron Coderre has created a sample [...]

Do you need to take your Excel skills up a notch (or several notches)? Excel and charting expert, Chandoo, from chandoo.org, has opened another session of his online Excel School. Registration is open until June 21st only.
Would it help you learn more about Excel? Is it right for you?
It's Not For Everyone
I can't be [...]

How can you get missing data to show up in your Excel pivot table, showing a count of zero? AlexJ encountered this problem recently, and sent me his solution, to share with you.
One problem with pivot tables is that you can't use them to report on data that is not there. What if you [...]

You've probably used the Excel Paste Special command to multiply cells by a specific percentage, or to add the same amount to a group of cells.

For example, in the screenshot below, you could copy cell D2, and use the Paste Special, Add, command to add that amount to cells B2:B5.

After using the [...]

Did you enter the Excel 2010 Future of Productivity Giveaway, that ended at noon yesterday, Tuesday, June 8th? The giveaway prize was a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, a Flip video camera, and a Seagate 1TB hard drive.
Of course, I used Excel to select the winner, from all the valid comment entries. I typed [...]