Calculate Differences From Values in a Pivot Table

A pivot table is a great tool to do analysis since it's useful for summing up or aggregating data. However it has some fancier custom calculations and one of these is to find the difference between values. A useful example is when you want to see how many items you sold in the different months between two years. This video will show a data set of cars sales between 2017 and the previous year to figure out the difference of monthly sales between the two years. You might think it maybe a calculation to calculate the difference between two pivot tables, but it's just one and just subtraction (or comparison) between two columns It's a short video to show you how to make a year over year comparison between data.

Excel Combination Chart of Sales vs Target

If you need to chart some kinds of data to a goal like sales to a target, Excel makes this easy with the combo chart of a column chart along with a line chart (initially). The columns can be the sales and the line series will represent the target. Most times this is enough when you have a target that doesn't change much. However if there are change to the target having the line vary may not looks visually appealing. Another example in this videos that is also a combo chart is actually using the combination of two column charts but have them on different y axis.

Convert Numbers to Words in Excel

Convert numbers to words seems lot a often sought out request for Excel. One day it may be a function or even command that can be entered or clicked on the ribbon. However it's not, but there is a workaround solution that Microsoft has provided in the form of VBA. They actually posted a knowledge article (along with the code) on a function call SPELLNUMBER. Just do a web search for this text to find the Microsoft page to get the code and instructions on how to apply it. One caveat is that there will be some errors to troubleshoot through, but it wasn't so bad.