Create Custom Sort Order Pivot Table

Did you know you could have a custom sort order for pivot tables? You can customize a sort order when using the drop down sort features to enable a sort like bronze, silver and gold. Or in this example green, blue or diamond; which corresponds with ski slope difficulty in some resorts. You'll have to customize a sort order but it's easy.

Quickly Calculate Investment Return

If you're given an scenario where you have the present value of an investment and a future value of that investment with not periodic investments for five years, could you figure out a rate of return per year for that investment? There's a common business concept of Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and and there's an Excel function called RRI that will help you calculate it

Create a Dropdown List

Creating dropdown list is useful when you can to make it easy to select items from a list. Whether you use it for a dashboard or for you stakeholders to make a selection for other types of interactivity, it's fairly easy to create.

Quickly Sum or Average without Formulas

If you wanted to do a quick sum or average of your rows or columns of data, you'd think that selection of the cells and writing a quick SUM or AVERAGE function was what needed to be done. However you can get the sum or average without writing any formulas. Just select your data and look at the taskbar. There a bunch of other things it can do besides sum or average like count, min and max.

Quickly Create Subtotals

Creating sub totals in Excel can be done many ways. One favorite is to use Pivot Tables; but if you don't needs all the extra fancy capabilities of the Pivot Table just use the Sub Total command. All you need to do is just sort a main column for the group you want to subtotal and then use the Sub Total command to take care of the rest.

Highlight All Formula Cells

When you've got a worksheet full of functions and formulas (or a combination of them), it sometimes gets hard to figure out what cells you'd need to pay attention to. This could be especially true if you're working with people that need to help fill in values or need to know where the formula are so they don't mistakenly update them. You can highlight cells that have formula in a couple easy steps

Quickly Remove Blank Rows

When you get a table of data sometimes it's got some blanks cells. For those records in the row where there's any cell that is blank, you may not need that record...so you want to get rid of them. To delete some record rows manually is not hard if you have just a few rows, but if you've got a lot, there's any easier and faster way to do this.