On October 17 we celebrated spreadsheet day. It was a day full of excitement around the globe! Crowds gathered around spreadsheets…dancing and drinking occurred into the wee hours of the morning. Part of the celebration included a lookup formula challenge from Debra Dalgleish (spreadsheet day creator). Continue reading
Have you ever had the experience where one event causes you to remember something from years ago? This happened to me today while reading the New Yorker magazine. What does Lucas de Groot, a Dutch typeface designer, have to do with Excel’s VBA language? What is “Fontgate”? Well…read on and I’ll tell you! Continue reading
Data lands in Microsoft Excel in many different structures. Data Analysts like me will often tell you to normalize your data before starting your analysis. This post contains three examples in which normalizing your data might not be necessary when doing a quick analysis. Continue reading
This Excel puzzle almost sounds like it could be solved with a quick COUNTIFS function but it’s a bit more involved than that. Nevertheless, it doesn’t have to get complicated as it can still be solved using a few simple steps. Continue reading
I stumbled across this interesting data-set that lists Toronto’s indoor ice rinks. I thought that it would be fun to visualize the rink locations so I used Excel’s 3D Map feature. Continue reading
Customers can make multiple purchases per month. What is the maximum amount that a customer has spent in a single month? This was a video from the amazing Mike Girvin (Excelisfun). The question is clear, but how did Mike solve it? How would you solve it? Continue reading
Last week I saw an interesting Excel puzzle from Leila Gharani on YouTube. Leila solved it using a sumproduct function. I made a video showing different solutions. Wasif Mustafa sent me his 3 helper column solution. Then Oz du Soleil created a video showing two solutions. So many ways to solve it! Continue reading
We can create random data using RANDBETWEEN and INDEX functions. What if you want to create random data that favors some values over others? People have told me that they copy and paste or manually drag the values to repeat them. See how we can automate this with just four easy steps! Continue reading
One of the highlights of my life was travelling to the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro to watch my sister, Krista DuChene, run in the women’s marathon. Her story is inspirational. Krista fractured her leg on April 28, 2014 during a half marathon and then in August of 2015 she broke a bone in her foot only one year before the Olympics.
Despite how amazing Excel is there are times when you’ll find yourself shaking with fear! For example, have you ever seen anything as scary as this =ISERROR(FIND(_xlfn.CONCAT($A2:$E2),_xlfn.CONCAT($I$2:$M$6))) What is xlfn ??? Continue reading