Learn Clever Excel Tricks

Anyone can learn the basics of Excel and get the job done, but if you really want to power ahead, try some of these clever Excel tricks. If you use Excel a lot, just one of these lessons could end up taking hours off your week, leaving you with more time to get other stuff done.

 Excel offers a couple of handy functions that you can use to calculate the smallest and largest values in a range of cells. They are simple functions that go by the names of MIN() and MAX(). This lesson shows you how to use them. It also introduces SMALL() and LARGE(), functions which duplicate what MIN and MAX do, plus more besides. 

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 Excel offers a couple of handy functions that you can use to calculate the smallest and largest values in a range of cells. They are simple functions that go by the names of MIN() and MAX(). This lesson shows you how to use them. It also introduces SMALL() and LARGE(), functions which duplicate what MIN and MAX do, plus more besides. 

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In this lesson, we cover how to print an Excel spreadsheet with page numbers on each page. Excel has changed a lot over the years, but one thing that hasn't changed is the way that you insert page numbers into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, Excel 2010 does not make it easy to find the options for doing this. This lesson covers the basics of inserting page numbers as well as providing an overview of some more advanced options.

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The SUMPRODUCT function allows you to multiply two arrays of numbers together (e.g. Quantity Sold and Price Per Unit) and add the results each individual calculation together. Without the SUMPRODUCT function, you'll find yourself having to create a third column in which you multiply the Quantity by Price for each row, and then find the sum of all the individual formulas. This lesson shows you how to use SUMPRODUCT to do all that with just one formula.

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In this lesson, we cover how to print an Excel spreadsheet with page numbers on each page. Excel has changed a lot over the years, but one thing that hasn't changed is the way that you insert page numbers into a spreadsheet. Unfortunately, Excel 2010 does not make it easy to find the options for doing this. This lesson covers the basics of inserting page numbers as well as providing an overview of some more advanced options.

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Sometimes you'll find yourself working with dates in an Excel spreadsheet that have been pasted or imported into Excel from another datasource. When that happens, Excel can treat those dates as text - in other words, they look like dates but don't behave like dates. For example you can't sort by date properly. This lesson looks at several ways you can convert a date which Excel is treating as text into a proper date value in Excel.

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This lesson shows you now to extract text from a cell in Excel. This is useful when you have a cell containing combining numbers and text, such as a part number, or several text values separated by commas. It introduces the RIGHT() and LEFT() functions, which are essential text manipulation functions in Excel.

47 comments

Sometimes you'll find yourself working with dates in an Excel spreadsheet that have been pasted or imported into Excel from another datasource. When that happens, Excel can treat those dates as text - in other words, they look like dates but don't behave like dates. For example you can't sort by date properly. This lesson looks at several ways you can convert a date which Excel is treating as text into a proper date value in Excel.

96 comments

This lesson shows you now to extract text from a cell in Excel. This is useful when you have a cell containing combining numbers and text, such as a part number, or several text values separated by commas. It introduces the RIGHT() and LEFT() functions, which are essential text manipulation functions in Excel.

47 comments

The SUMIFS function in Excel allows you to sum the values in a range of cells that meet multiple conditions, or criteria. For example, you might use the SUMIFS function in a sales spreadsheet to to add up the value of sales of a specific product by a given sales person (e.g. the value of all sales of a microwave oven made by John). This lesson explains how to use SUMIFS.

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