Wise Owl Training - Excel blogs (page 1 of 4)

How to build an Excel word search without even using VBA

Posted by Andy Brown on 23 February 2021

Details of an impressive new Excel word search system which allows you to recreate a randomised grid every time you recalculate your formulae!

The new Excel data types will make a big difference to your life

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 December 2020

Soon you will be able to display information from almost any common dataset in your Excel worksheets automatically. For now your access will probably be limited to stocks and geographical data, but many more data types (including your own custom ones) should be available soon.

Creating and using Lambda Functions in Excel

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 December 2020

You can now create and use anonymous functions in Excel (usually called "Lambda functions"). Learn how to add to the stock of Excel functions without having to learn any programming code!

You can use the new LET function in Excel to store interim formulae calculations

Posted by Andy Brown on 24 October 2020

The new Excel LET function lets you create variables to store the results of calculations, making formulae easier to read and quicker to calculate.

Why the XLOOKUP function should kill off VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH

Posted by Andy Brown on 24 September 2020

The XLOOKUP function has at least 7 advantages over an equivalent VLOOKUP function, as this blog shows. Convert to XLOOKUP now, and then convert your colleagues!

Find out how dynamic arrays in Excel will change your (working) life!

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 February 2020

Dynamic arrays are a new feature being rolled out in Excel 365. This blog explains how they work, and why they will make so many things in Excel easier.

Excel MasterClass: creating a worksheet and chart to track your weight

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 October 2019

It's fairly easy to create a simple Excel worksheet to chart your weight, but this master class shows you lots of tips and tricks to make the final result quicker to create and easier to use.

Introducting the new XLOOKUP and XMATCH functions

Posted by Andy Brown on 13 September 2019

Microsoft have finally recognised the limitations of the VLOOKUP function, and are rolling out the XLOOKUP function to supersede it, as well as the useful (if less significant) XMATCH function.

How to confuse other Excel users by changing your cell styles

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 August 2019

Want to make a worksheet inexplicably change colour, and display strange text in cells? This blog explains how you can do this using the Normal style.

Another OOH moment in Excel - a quick way to create charts

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 August 2019

The previous blog listing great OOH moments in Excel omitted one of the biggest - the absolute quickest way to create a chart.

A different owl's take on the five biggest ooh! moment tips in Excel

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 June 2019

This month it's Shaun's turn to nominate the five best short-cut tips in Excel.

A short-cut key to bring up the arguments of user-defined functions

Posted by Andy Brown on 17 June 2019

When you discover a new short-cut key, should you share it? This blog shows a way to bring up Intellisense for the arguments to user-defined functions in Excel VBA.

Why the Excel range name conflict dialog box appears, and how to avoid looping

Posted by Andy Brown on 14 June 2019

When you're copying worksheets containing range names, Excel can detect conflicts and take you into a seemingly endless loop of Yes/No dialog boxes. This blog explains why this happens, and how to get out of the loop!

Andy B's five biggest OOH! moments on an Excel training course.

Posted by Andy Brown on 09 May 2019

All trainers live for that moment when someone's face lights up, as they learn something new which will change their working life for the better. This blog lists my 5 biggest such OOH moments from our Excel training courses. How many of these tips do you know?

Use the Excel camera tool, or create a linked picture in Word or PowerPoint

Posted by Andy Brown on 25 April 2018

This blog shows options for creating a webcam focused on one particular area of an Excel workbook! You can do this either by pasting the Excel range into PowerPoint or Word as a linked picture, or by using the Excel camera tool.

Changes to Wise Owl Excel courses (including a new intermediate course)

Posted by Andy Brown on 15 January 2018

We've revamped our Excel course offerings, to include a new one-day Intermediate Excel course to sit between our introduction and advanced courses.

How to create multiple worksheets based on pivot table report filter values

Posted by Andy Brown on 08 December 2017

Did you know that you can automatically generate multiple versions of a pivot table, with each one configured to filter by a different item? We didn't - this blog is an attempt to apologise for our oversight!

How to reuse a query created in Query Editor or Power Query

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 November 2017

This short blog explains how you can copy and paste the steps of a query that you've created in Power Query (within Power BI Desktop). The steps also work for queries created in Power Query within Excel.

Loading live web data into Excel without writing VBA code to scrape HTML

Posted by Andy Brown on 21 August 2017

Need to get tables of data into Excel from a website? There's no need to write lots of VBA code to scrape the site - just use Power Query to create a live link to the relevant page(s).

Find the many ways to interact directly between Excel and Power BI Service

Posted by Andy Brown on 29 June 2017

You can pull Excel workbooks (or individual data ranges) into Power BI Service, or push them from Excel using a special add-in. This blog shows how to use both approaches, as well as the underwhelming Analyze in Excel feature.