Articles

Criteria are a key concept in Excel, but building useful criteria for text, numbers, dates, times, etc. is hard because it requires a good understanding of how Excel handles data. This guide will help you build formulas that work the first time with over 50 examples.

Have you entered a formula, but Excel is not showing a result? This can be very confusing, and you might think you've somehow broken your spreadsheet. However, it's likely a simple problem. With a little troubleshooting, you can get things working again.

INDEX and MATCH is the most popular tool in Excel for performing more advanced lookups. This is because INDEX and MATCH are incredibly flexible – you can do horizontal and vertical lookups, 2-way lookups, left lookups, case-sensitive lookups, and even lookups based on multiple criteria. If you want to improve your Excel skills, INDEX and MATCH should be on your list. See below for many examples.

One of the most useful features of data validation is the ability to create a dropdown list that let users select a value from a predefined list. But how can you make one dropdown dynamically respond to another? In other words, how can you make the values in a dropdown list depend on another value in the worksheet? Read on to see how to create dependent dropdown lists in Excel.

Data validation can help control what a user can enter into a cell. You can use data validation to make sure a value is a number, a date, or to present a dropdown menu with predefined choices to a user. This guide provides an overview of the data validation feature, with many examples.

Sure, you can use a complicated WEEKDAY formula to generate a list of weekends. But with WORKDAY.INTL, you can do the same thing with a WAY simpler formula. The trick is to use a special 7-digit "mask" to filter out all dates except weekends.

In this article, we explain how to use concatenation to display friendly and useful messages in your spreadsheets. The messages are dynamic and respond instantly to changes, so the effect is polished and professional.

The EOMONTH function is one of those little gems in Excel that can save you a lot of trouble. It's a simple function that does just one thing: given a date, it returns the last day of a month. You can use EOMONTH to build all kinds of useful Excel formulas.

Named ranges make formulas easier to read, faster to develop, and more portable. They're also useful for data validation, hyperlinks, and dynamic ranges. This article shows you how you can use named ranges to build better spreadsheets, and better formulas.

In this article, we show you how to replace a complicated IF statement with a clever and compact formula based on MIN or MAX. This is a great tip any time you need to choose the smaller or greater of two values inside a formula.

Although Excel ships with many conditional formatting "presets", these are limited. A more powerful way to apply conditional formatting is with formulas, because formulas allow you to apply rules that use more sophisticated logic. This article shows 10 examples, including how to highlight rows, column differences, missing values, and how to build Gantt charts and search boxes with conditional formatting.

Are nested IFs evil? Are they necessary? Are there alternatives? The answer is Yes! This in-depth article explores nested IF formulas in detail, with lots of tips, and several alternatives.

MOD is nerdy, but cool. If you've ever struggled to create a more complex formula in Excel, you'll like this one. It shows you how to build a more complex formula step-by-step, without going crazy.

Although VLOOKUP is a pretty simple function, there is plenty that can go wrong. Quickly learn more than 20 things you should know about VLOOKUP to make your experience pleasant and profitable.

Many users aren't aware of it, but VLOOKUP will use approximate match mode by default. This can be a disaster because VLOOKUP can return a totally incorrect result. Read below to learn how match modes work in VLOOKUP, and how to avoid this dangerous problem.

If you've ever tried to apply conditional formatting with a formula, you know the hardest part is making sure the formula actually works. Here's an easy way to test the formula, before you use it in a rule.