Sunday, November 7, 2021

Create Horizontal Box Plot with Mean and Median

Box and whisker charts are something that is easy to create in Excel if you’ve got version 2016 or higher. There’s the option to create a vertical box plot but unfortunately there’s no option to create a horizontal box and whiskers chart. It’s actually fairly easy to create a sideways box plot by modifying a stacked column chart and adding a scatter chart for the mean (average) value.

Sunday, October 31, 2021

Presenting Different Scenarios with OFFSET Function

The OFFSET function lets you refer to a cell(s) that's a specific distance from another cell. Though not a lookup function, it can almost work like VLOOKUP. I'll cover an example to show how the OFFSET function works with a simple use case of picking different scenarios of price and quantity inputs to determine revenue outputs.

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Estimate with a Linear or Power Demand Curve

In Excel you can chart out an estimation of demand with a demand curve. A demand curve gives us an estimation for the relationship between price and the number of units that a customer would demand or the units of what we’d expect to sell. There are two common types of demand curves: a linear demand curve and a power demand curve. With a linear demand curve, the number of units demanded increases in a linear way as price decreases. Supposedly there are very few examples where a linear demand curve exist but it’s useful because it’s simple to grasp. The second common demand curve is the power demand curve. It’s probably something more identifiable for real world examples in the cases where the effect of price changes may have a bigger impact on demand. So you might have a question on which one to use and the best way to do that is to get some data to chart it out. See the video to learn how.

Sunday, October 17, 2021

Embed and Caption Name an Excel File in PowerPoint

When you shared PowerPoint and Excel files, sometime you just want to share one item instead of two. You can embed your Excel file into PowerPoint and have it clicked to open up. It works well when you don't expect the contents of the Excel file to change though it could increase the PPT file size depending on the size of the Excel data. You can even give the name to the caption of the embedded file or just give it a click to open text so users know what to do.

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Lookup the Last Value in Excel [XLOOKUP & INDEX / MATCH]

Looking up the last value is usually not the default when you perform lookups with various lookup functions. However there are times when you want to find the last item in a list or array that matches a criteria. With the newer XLOOKUP function, it makes this job very easy. The only catch is that XLOOKUP is on newer version of Excel. If you didn't have the latest Excel version, you can still perform a lookup for the last item and that can be done with a combination of the INDEX and MATCH functions.

Sunday, October 3, 2021

Rename Multiple Columns with Power Query

Sometimes you get data from others that have columns that you'd need to change the name. If it's something you do once, using the Excel Find and Replace function is fine. But if it's something you're going to do multiple times or a recurring basis, you'd think that a VBA macro is something that will need to be written. And if you don't know VBA, this bulk automation process may seem out of reach. However if you have Power Query in your versions of Excel, it's actually quite easy to rename multiple columns at once with some nested M code functions.

Sunday, September 26, 2021

Removing Multiple Columns in Excel | Power Query

To remove or delete blank columns in an Excel table is fairly straight forward and easy. Just select the column or press Ctrl to select multiple columns to delete. However if there might be a LOT of columns and they might be non consecutive (i.e., not next to each other). You may have received this table from a system, person or some other source that has just not thought about you as a end user (the table has twenty or more empty columns EVERYWHERE) and it's going to be a lot of clicking. There are a couple a ways this could be solved and it doesn't involved writing VBA. There is a little bit of M code to write in one of the examples, but it is not that much considered its usefulness. See the video now to see how it's done.