Articles

Build friendly messages with concatenation

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 - Formula Friday

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 in Excel

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.

Replace ugly IFs with MAX or MIN

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.

Conditional formatting with formulas

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.

19 tips for nested IF formulas

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.

23 things you should know about VLOOKUP

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.

Danger: beware VLOOKUP defaults

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.

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