Happy Spreadsheet Day! What are your feelings about allocating days to celebration or awareness of certain things? Like International Talk Like a Pirate Day (19th September), Oatmeal Nut Waffles Day (11th March) or Bathtub Day (7th October)? Well, the 17 October is International Spreadsheet day. Normally, I would think these days are pointless, but I Read More
I love using the double VLOOKUP trick to get some lighting fast calculation times in Excel. The drawback is that the list being looked up has to be sorted to prevent errors. If a list were not sorted, it would be great to see a warning. Then the user can take action to sort the Read More
Excel Off the Grid has reached its first birthday. 12 months ago, when I started the site, I had no idea what I was doing (to be honest, I still don’t), but it’s been fun. There have been over 100,000 words, across 120 posts all about Excel (and sometimes PowerPoint or Word). So, it’s certainly Read More
From stock parts to holiday villas, from employees to logos, there are many reasons you may want to automatically change an image based on a cell value. In this post, we’ll explore 3 different methods to achieve this task: Named range + INDEX/MATCH + linked picture Chart fill + #N/A VBA User Defined Function Each Read More
In July 2017, I released the Calc Buddy Add-in. It’s a tool which monitors Excel’s calculation mode and shows a warning whenever it is different to the user’s preferred setting. As I was getting the Add-in ready for release, I decided I wanted the button to be within the Calculation section of the Formula Ribbon. Read More
Have you heard of the mysterious “array formulas”? Do you use them? Or are you like most Excel users, you’ve placed them to the “too hard” pile, never to be seen again. They always seem to crop up in forums as solutions to some tricky formula questions. In this post, I want to introduce to Read More
Do you ever find yourself typing out the same standard lists over and over again, such as lists of products, cost centers, projects or companies? I do. It is essential these lists don’t exclude any items and are presented in the same order each time. Lists of 4 or 5 things are easy to remember, Read More
In this post, I will show you, step-by-step, how to create an Add-in with its own custom Ribbon. Rather than just creating an example Add-in which says, “Hello World!”, we will build something useful – a calculation timer. The process of creating any Add-in will be similar, so you can apply these principles to your Read More
Two years ago, I created my first Excel Add-in. It had just one button, it copied the selected range of cells and pasted it as a picture into a PowerPoint slide. The picture would be in exactly the right place and exactly right size. There was no more copying, pasting, moving and resizing to do, Read More
Creating advanced charts in Excel can take a bit of time, as there are so many things to change. Recently, I had to prepare a financial presentation quickly, like really quickly. I knew exactly which charts were required (I had been given very clear instructions) and I knew how to do them (which is always Read More