Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 24 April 2025
Knowing how many cells to reference in an Excel formula can be tricky if you don't know how your data is going to change in the future. It's common to "cheat" by referencing an entire column or row, but this is often inefficient. Enter Excel's new TRIMRANGE function and Trim Refs feature!
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 24 April 2025
Creating named ranges in Excel can make your formulas much easier to create and read, and we encourage people to use them often. Range names do have one big limitation, however: they don't automatically expand if you add new data to the worksheet. This blog shows you a couple of ways to create dynamic range names to get around this problem.
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 01 November 2024
You may be familiar with using pivot tables in Excel to group and aggregate a list of data. Did you know that you can now do the same thing using simple functions? This blog shows you how to use the new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions to quickly summarise data.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 September 2024
Excel Labs is an experimental toolkit being developed as part of Microsoft Garage. This blog shows how you can use it to call AI functions, use the advanced formula editor and use an Excel-based Python editor.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 July 2024
Microsoft are introducing two new functions to Excel: TRANSLATE (to translate passages of text into another language) and DETECTLANGUAGE (to determine the language in which a particular passage of text is written).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 June 2024
If you love Excel and are also a fan of regular expressions, your Christmas has come early! And if like me you don't know how to create regular expressions, you can just get an AI tool to build them for you ...
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 February 2023
You've always been able to add images within worksheets, but now for the first time you can add them within cells - which is strangely satisfying!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 20 April 2022
Get a preview of the 3 text functions and 11 array functions coming to your version of Excel very soon!
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!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 01 November 2013
The SUMPRODUCT function is one of the hardest ones to understand in Excel, but it's also pretty useful. This blog gives clear examples of how to use SUMPRODUCT for conditional sums, weighted averages and the like.
Posted by
Michael Allsop
on 17 October 2012
Up, down, ceiling, floor or multiples… and you thought rounding numbers was simple!
Posted by
Andrew Gould
on 22 August 2011
The VLOOKUP function in Excel is perfect for categorising a continuous range of numbers. This topical example shows you how to calculate an exam grade based on a numerical score.