Congratulations to Alex Kerin, whose name I selected in the random draw for the Excelerator Quiz giveaway. Here’s his name at the top of the list, after I used the RAND function, and sorted the Rand column in ascending order.

Alex’s prize is a 23” monitor, plus a keyboard and mouse, courtesy of the PowerPivot team. [...]

It’s Price Book publishing week for one of my clients, and we’ve been making lists, and checking them twice. Or 3 or 4 times, or more!
When comparing the new prices to the previous prices, an Excel AutoFilter comes in handy. You can select the same product or model in each workbook, and easily compare item [...]

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 [...]

I love advanced filters, but this week they caused me some serious grief.
Advanced filters in Excel are quick and powerful, and I use lots of them. They’re a great way to pull a list of unique items from a table, or send specific data from one sheet to another.
People sometimes have trouble with an advanced [...]

For a simple database, Excel can do a pretty good job of organizing and reporting your data. This example shows a movie collection database, but you could set up something similar to keep track of books, sales orders, or almost anything else.
In this database you can store movie data, then create a list of movies [...]

If you’ve imported data into Excel, you might need to clean it up before you can use it.
For example, your imported data might have Region headings in column A, Employee subheadings in column B, and sales data in columns C and D.

If you want to filter or sort this data, you need to [...]

We’ll set up an Excel workbook so you can click on a map, and see a list of fictional doctors in the state that you selected.

Set up the Map
First, I found a clip art map of the continental USA, with a separate shape for each state, and pasted that into a workbook.
Next, named [...]