Hey there, I have a SUPER exciting announcement! April is about to get a whole lot sweeter with our Power BI Dashboard Contest! Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Craft the most EPIC dashboard for the Awesome Chocolates CEO with sales & financial insights! Winners stand a chance to score up to $500 in Amazon Gift Cards, plus some serious bragging rights! Contest Rules and Information Participants must use Power BI (any recent version) to create the dashboard. The dashboard should be built with native visuals only. No add-ons or marketplace visuals or Python/R visuals. The dashb ..read more

Compound interest is defined as “the interest on savings calculated on both the initial principal and the accumulated interest from previous periods.” Classically, known as “interest on interest”, this is the most common type interest used in every day finance situations.  To calculate compound interest on principal amount P at the rate of interest R for the number of years N and compounded T times per year we can use the formula = P*(1+R/T)^(N*T) In this article, let me explain the necessary Excel formulas to calculate compound interest using your data. In this Article Compound ..read more

We can use Excel’s LOOKUP function to quickly convert exam or test scores to letter grades like A+ or F. In this article, let me explain the process and necessary formulas. I will also share a technique to calculate letter grades from test scores using percentiles. Step 1: Set up a Mapping Table for Letter Grade & Scores In your workbook, set up a mapping (or lookup) table like this to map out each of the letter grades to the test score boundary. When setting up the mapping table, make sure to start from lower score to higher score (for ex: 0 to 100) For each grade, just specify the lowe ..read more

Excel 365’s FILTER() function is great for getting a cut of data that meets your criteria. But what if you need to filter and then show non-adjacent columns? Something like below. In this article, let me show you a few options to get discrete columns after filtering with the FILTER function. Using CHOOSECOLS with FILTER() Imagine you have a table data named “staff” and you want to see all the staff who joined in year 2021. We can use below FILTER function for that. =FILTER(staff, YEAR(staff[date of join])=2021) This will provide a list of all staff who joined in year 2021, as depicted below ..read more

Ever need to extract just the bold portion of some cells automatically? You can use my getBoldText VBA custom function to do that. This function takes a cell and returns the bold portion if any. See these sample results: Using Custom Functions in Excel To extract the bold text from cells, we are going to use User Defined Function (UDF)  feature of Excel. This feature let’s us build custom functionality that is not part of Excel.  Step 1: Go to Visual Basic Editor (Press ALT+F11 or click on Developer Ribbon > Visual Basic) Step 2: Right on your workbook in the left-hand p ..read more

So you have a SPILL error in your Excel tables? In this quick article, let me show you 3 easy fixes to the problem. Fix 0: See if Excel can auto-fix the formula This is not really a fix. But if you write certain types of formulas in table, Excel will warn you about the potential spill error and fix it for you. See this example: One lesson we can take away from this auto-correction of the formula is that if you are using a table column style formula, change it to [@ column] style. For example: Instead of LEFT([Name]) use LEFT([@Name], 1) =IF(LEN([Value])>6, “Too long”, “Short enough”) can ..read more

Do you want to calculate loan amortization schedule in Excel? We can use PMT & SEQUENCE functions to quickly and efficiently generate the full loan amortization table for any number of years. Set up input section for loan amortization table First, you need to set up the parameters for calculating loan schedule. We need below information. Interest Rate (annualized) Loan duration (in years) Payments per year (for ex: 12 for monthly, 52 for weekly and 26 for fortnightly) Loan amount For the sake of the example on this page, I am using 5.35% annual interest rate (cell D3), 30 years loa ..read more

Do you want to create a dynamic dependent drop down list in Excel like below? You can use XLOOKUP and data validation to set this up quickly. It is fully dynamic and works across a full column too. Steps to Create Multiple Dependent Dropdown List in Excel Dependent or cascading dropdowns are a valuable way to make your workbooks error free and improve the user experience. Follow these steps to set them up. Step 1: Set up your validation list data. In a blank area of your workbook, set up the data validation lists. If you have just two-levels, use the structure as depicted below. If you have 3 ..read more

VLOOKUP may not make you tall, rich and famous, but learning it can certainly give you wings. It makes you to connect two different tabular lists and saves a ton of time. In my opinion understanding VLOOKUP, INDEX and MATCH worksheet formulas can transform you from normal excel user to a data processing beast. Today, lets understand how to use these formulas better. What is the syntax for Match, Vlookup and INDEX? Here is the syntax for these three very powerful functions in plain English: What are vlookup () and match () ? VLOOKUP and MATCH are your way of asking excel to find a needle in hay ..read more

Do you want to manage your staff’s allocations, shift schedules and view the results in a 4 week grid fashion (like below)? Then you are going to love my FREE Staff Roster Excel Template. What can you do with this template? You can set up (up to 3) employees on shifts across a 4 week grid. See who is working on what days with staff pictures Manage employee’s time off and get alerted if you map someone on their day off. Look at staff allocation and workloads in a graph to see who is doing more and who is doing less work. Beautiful, simple and elegant worksheet to interactively manage the shift ..read more