At the surface, an Excel table just sounds like a way to organize data. In truth, this generic name covers a ton of useful features. Tables containing hundreds or even thousands of rows and columns can be instantly recalculated and totaled, sorted and filtered, updated with new information and reformatted, summarized with pivot tables and exported. Continue reading
Lists help us put things in order. Stuff to buy, tasks to solve, places to visit, movies to watch, books to read, people to invite, video games to play - everything around us is practically filled with those lists. And if you use Google Sheets, chances are that it would be best to track your endeavours there. Let's see what instruments spreadsheets offer for the task. Continue reading
Looking for a way to visualize a large volume of data in a little space? Sparklines are a quick and elegant solution. These mini-charts are specially designed to show data trends inside a single cell. Continue reading
This blog post brings exclusive Google Sheets functions that Excel doesn't have to your attention. They are conveniently classified by Google based on their primary task. So just pick the group from the table of contents and you'll find their descriptions with the simplest examples. Continue reading
Does it often happen to you that you send an email and a moment later you wish you hadn't? Perhaps you clicked Reply All instead of Reply, or accidentally sent sensitive information to a wrong person, or just realized that your angry response was a bad idea and you need to cool down. Continue reading
A hasty click of the mouse can happen to the best of us. So, the Send button is hit, your email is on its way to the recipient, and you are cringing at the thought of what it may cost you. Before you start weighing the consequences and composing an apology notice, why not try to retrieve the erroneous message? Continue reading
Every once in a while each Google Sheets user faces the inevitable: combining several sheets into one. Copy-pasting is tedious and time-consuming, so there has to be another way. And you're right - there are several ways, in fact. So get your tables ready and follow the steps from this article. Continue reading
When you hit the Print button in Excel, the entire spreadsheet is printed by default. But what if you don't really need to print out all the content of a huge worksheet? Then set the print area that includes only your selection. Continue reading
Living in a digital world, we still need a printed copy every now and then. At first sight, printing Excel spreadsheets is super easy. Just click the Print button, right? In reality, a well-organized and beautifully formatted sheet that looks great on a monitor is often a mess on a printed page. Continue reading
In this guide, you'll find out how Google stores dates and how you can format them for your better convenience. Some date formats are offered to you by spreadsheets while others should be created from scratch. There are even a couple of handy functions for the task. I also describe a couple of ways to convert your dates to numbers and text if necessary. Continue reading
When you know the internal rate of return of a project, you may think you have all you need to evaluate it - the bigger the IRR the better. In practice, it's not that simple. Continue reading
For many years, finance experts and textbooks have warned about the flaws and deficiencies of the internal rate of return, but many executives keep using it for assessing capital projects. Do they enjoy living on the edge or simply are not aware of the existence of MIRR? Continue reading
Calculating IRR for periodic cash flows is easy. In real life situations, however, cash inflows and outflows often happen at irregular intervals. Thankfully, Microsoft Excel has a special function to find IRR in such cases, and this tutorial will teach you how to use it. Continue reading
"Concatenate" usually means to link something together in a series or a chain. It's what you do whenever you merge text from multiple Google Sheets cells. This article collects the most popular and easy solutions to help you solve the concatenation puzzle. Continue reading
IRR in Excel is one of the financial functions for calculating the internal rate of return, which is frequently used in capital budgeting to judge projected returns on investments. Continue reading
Microsoft Excel has a special function for calculating NPV, but its use can be tricky especially if you have little experience in financial modeling. The purpose of this tutorial is to show you how the Excel NPV function works and point out possible pitfalls when calculating the net present value of a series of cash flows. Continue reading
As with other Office applications, Excel ribbon is your primary interface that contains every command and feature you'll ever need. What to know what Excel is capable of? Go explore the ribbon! Continue reading
Introduced in Excel 2007, the ribbon allows you to access most of the commands and features available in Excel. Why would you want to customize the ribbon? Perhaps you will find it convenient to have your own tab with your favorite and most used commands at your fingertips. Continue reading
Ribbon is the central point of whatever you do in Excel, the area where most of features and commands available to you reside. Do you feel the ribbon takes up too much of your screen space? No problem, one click of your mouse, and it is hidden. Continue reading
Getting to the commands you use most often should be easy. And it is exactly what the Quick Access Toolbar is designed for. Add your favorite commands to the QAT so they are only a click away no matter what ribbon tab you currently have open. Continue reading
You want to access one of advanced Excel features but are stuck at the very first step: where's the Developer tab they all talk about? The good news is that the Developer tab is available in every version of Excel though it is not enabled by default. This article shows how to quickly activate it. Continue reading
In Microsoft Excel, there are 6 different functions for calculating variance but all of them are designed to find variance in the classical sense, i.e. how far a set of values are spread out from their average. In this article, you will learn how to calculate percentage variance between two cells. Continue reading
Variance is one of the most useful tools in probability theory and statistics. In science, it describes how far each number in the data set is from the mean. In practice, it often shows how much something changes. In this article, we will analyze different methods of calculating variance in Excel. Continue reading
Even in the modern versions of Excel, there is no easy way to insert a vertical line in a chart. However, "no easy way" does not mean no way at all. We will just have to do a little lateral thinking! Continue reading
You may think percentage calculations are useful only if you use them for work. But in reality, they help you in everyday life. Do you know how to tip properly? Is this discount a real deal? How much will you pay with this interest rate? Come find the answers to these and other similar questions in this article. Continue reading
The tutorial shows how to make an amortization schedule in Excel to detail periodic payments on an amortizing loan or mortgage, including an amortization schedule with extra payments and a variable number of periods. Continue reading
The interest portion of a loan payment can be calculated manually by multiplying the period's interest rate by the remaining balance. But Microsoft Excel has a special function for this – the IPMT function. In this tutorial, we will go in-depth explaining its syntax and providing real-life formula examples. Continue reading
Whether there's summer knocking on our doors or winter invading Westeros, we still work in Google Sheets and have to compare different pieces of tables with one another. In this article, I'm sharing ways of matching your data and giving away tips on doing that swiftly. Continue reading
When you make periodic payments on a loan or mortgage, a certain part of each payment goes towards the interest and the remainder is applied to the loan principal. In this tutorial, we will look at how to use the PPMT function to calculate the principal portion of the payment. Continue reading
Combining duplicate rows in your spreadsheets may turn to one of the most intricate tasks. Let's see what Google formulas can help and get to know one smart add-on that does all the job for you. Continue reading
