Ever wanted to automatically format values in thousands, millions or billions in Excel? In this article, let me show you two powerful techniques to do just that. Technique 1: Using Custom Format Codes We can use Custom Number Format codes in Excel to quickly turn the number to thousands, millions or billions. To do this: Select your numbers and go to Format Cells (Ctrl 1) From the number tab, select “Custom” for category and type the code below: [<1000]##,##0;[<1000000]#,###.0,"K";#,###.0,,"M" Press OK to see the magic. How does it work? [<1000]##,##0;[<1000000]#,###.0,"K ..read more

You are the boss of ACME Inc. And one day, both of your accountants Sara and James come to you with two versions of the customer payment data. How do you compare these two Excel sheets and reconcile the data? We can use VLOOKUP to do just that. In this article, let me explain the step-by-step process. Step 1: Set up data in two Excel sheets Copy both sets of data to two sheets in an Excel file. For example, here I have two sheets – one with Sara’s data and another with James’ data. Both datasets have identical columns, but the data is not same. Step 2: Start with the first sheet and write the ..read more

Do you need inspiration for your upcoming Power BI sales dashboard? Well, I got you covered. In this page, let me present 33 alternatives for Sales Analytics Dashboards with Power BI. About a month ago, I asked you to visualize Sales data of Awesome Chocolates with Power BI. I got over 110 entries. After carefully reviewing all of them, I’ve narrowed down the list to just 33 options, which are presented in this page. Check them out and get inspired. About the Data & Business Needs All the dashboards on this page use the chocolate sales data for a fictional company, aptly named awes ..read more

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