Even though I’m already in my third week of study for my Manhattan GMAT online course, I still haven’t explored all the resources available to me on the Manhattan website. Last night I signed up for office hours with one of the Manhattan GMAT instructors and she informed about Manhattan’s Official Guide Tracker. I downloaded the file … Read more
I’ve never liked Excel’s default setting for its outline button structure.  If you notice from the example below, the default setting puts the outline button below your summary rows. Visually, I don’t think this is intuitive. I prefer to see the outline button above the summary rows. Making this change is very simple. First … Read more
Here’s a quick Excel 2007 tip I found just by accidentally playing with my mouse. It’s a little clunky at first if you’ve never used it before. But over time, this will make you faster at navigating the Ribbon. Simply place your cursor over the Ribbon and scroll up and down with your middle mouse … Read more
Data validation is one of the most popular features in Excel. For those unaware of what Data Validation is, you’ve probably seen it before. It usually takes the from of those drop down boxes you see, limiting the inputs available to you for a particular cell. You can also limit inputs without a drop down … Read more
1. You Have Your Numbers Formatted as Text 2. You Have a Trailing Space at the End of Your Values 3. You Forgot to Reference Lock Your Arrays During my days as the spreadsheet guy (oh wait, I still am the spreadsheet guy) I’d often get pinged by other analysts about why their VLOOKUP formulas … Read more
Any legitimate Excel user has used VLOOKUP and knows the syntax by heart. (Lookup Value, Array, Column, etc.) But many of these same users have never used INDEX MATCH before. INDEX MATCH is one of several lookup formulas available in Excel.  It has certain features that make it superior to VLOOKUP in many situations. Regardless … Read more
If you’re like me, you do a lot of formatting to the Book1.xls file that Excel initially opens up. However, if you find yourself making the same changes over and over again, you might just want to automate the whole startup formatting process. Implementing this is actually a really simple task. Open up Excel as … Read more