Monday 13 July 2015

Discover these 15 extremely powerful excel formulas and save a ton of time next time you open that spreadsheet-4

Hello Excel-lent,

Trust your weekend was good! 

First a joke. A guy calls up Microsoft help desk and says, "My computer says press any key to continue. But i can't find 'any' key on my keyboard."

Although none of our keyboards have 'any' key, they are filled with 100+ keys and when you press them right, you can zoom your way to awesomeness.

Tomorrow we'll talk about Excel keyboard shortcuts. As you can imagine, Excel has 100s of very useful and powerful keyboard shortcuts but trying to learn and memorize of all them is not only futile, but also very difficult. Instead, if you focus on learning just 10 most important shortcuts, you will not only save a lot of time, but also get one step closer to Excel awesomeness. 

Today, lets discuss about the remaining 4 of our 15 extremely powerful excel formulas..

12. Concatenate Formula

What's the use of Concatenate? What is does- adds a bunch of text to one another. 
Examples of Excel Concatenate formula:
concatenate("APC ","PDP ") = APCPDP, guess that's the name of the governing party now. Concatenate(A1,A2,A3) = adds the text values in cells A1,A2 and A3 but don't forget to activate your cell with the "=" sign first. 

13. Vlookup Formula

This formula is as important as Excel itself, it's one formula any data analyst would bless Microsoft for, for creating as it has made life interesting. It searches a list for a value you are looking for and returns a corresponding value.  
Example of Excel Vlookup formula:
vlookup("Okupe", list, 2, false) = finds where Okupe is in the list and returns the value in the 2nd column. This formula is very powerful and so we mustn't treat it as just a tissue paper. Expect more on this to ginger your data.



14. CountIf Formula

Counts of items in a list matching a condition. 
Examples of Excel Countif formula:
countif(A1:A20, 1) = counts how many cells have "1" 
countif(A1:A20, "<3") = counts how many cells have less than 3

For the records, there is a Count formula without the "if" but the "if" statement makes it conditional. Some other formulas like Sum, vlookup, hlookup, average etc lean on the "If" statement to carry out more conditional task. We will also discuss about these shortly.


15. CountIf Formula

The first time i mentioned "ABS" in a class, some Car freak guy responded with "Automatic Break System." I couldn't help but laugh, but in truth, ABS (Absolute) can help you break and manipulate any mathematical data if you use it well as it simply returns the absolute of a number.
Examples of Excel ABS formula:
ABS(-10) = return "10". Simple right? In a situation where you need to change the minus (-) sign of a data set to positive (+), you simply use ABS. 

With these, I challenge you to ABS(-your week) and have a POSITIVE and winning week ahead. 

Be Excel-lent!


Oladapo Sorinola 
BB pin 52E9802D
07014282477, 07062932708


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