Monday, March 7, 2022

Separate / Extract Data Flash Fill

Flash Fill was introduced in Excel 2016 and give you an easy way to split or extract text or values from one column cell to another. A common use is to split out a column with full name (i.e. first name last name like John Smith) to separate first and last name columns. Before you might have used LEFT, MID or RIGHT functions, but now with Flash Fill, there's no need to use those functions.

Monday, February 28, 2022

Millionaire Calculator NPER- Excel

f you're got a mutual fund or some kind of investment vehicle that lets you put in an initial investment and give you the chance to put in additional investments, how long will it take to get to a million bucks? Use the NPER function to find out.

Monday, February 21, 2022

Sort Column by Cell Color

Sorting columns are a common occurrence and usually done via ascending or descending based on A to Z or Z to A with text or number values. But did you know you can sort by color? The use case maybe that you've done some conditional formatting for the cell color and you want to sort on blue, yellow and green in that order. It can be done with the custom sort feature.

Monday, February 14, 2022

Calculate Cumulative Principal & Interest

When you've got a loan or mortgage and you're the analytical type, maybe you'd want to know how much you're paying in principal and interest for a giving time period. For example for the first year, how much is that payment for the principal (hint: it's not much) and how much of the payment is interest going to the bank (it might surprise you). You can figure this out with Excel.

Monday, February 7, 2022

Find Value NOT Between a Range

Excel makes it easy to find values that are between a range; say numbers between 20 to 40. If you wanted to find value outside the range (i.e., 1-19 or 40 and above), Excel makes it equally as easy. I'll show two ways you can do this; one with filtering and the other with conditional formatting.

Monday, January 31, 2022

Pivot Table Calculated Item Solve Order Issue

If you've created multiple calculated items in a pivot table you might get into a situation where they are not showing up correctly. Somehow the calculations are wrong or don't look right for what you're trying to communicate. Often times it will be the way that the calculations are ordered that is creating the confusion. Re-arranging the sort order of the calculated items is then the solution. This video will cover what dialogue windows can be used to resolve the issue and also go through the steps of creating the pivot table with the "wrong" series of steps that lead up to the problem.

Monday, January 24, 2022

Excel MIRR vs IRR

When looking to compare similar projects tools such as IRR and MIRR are used.  But what's the difference between these two when used for capital budgeting ranking? A major difference is that for IRR the cash inflows are reinvested at the project's IRR, while the MIRR is using an alternative re-investment rate for the cash inflows.  The video covers the basics of how to use the Excel IRR and MIRR functions.