Author: Constantin Kioulafas

Mathematical operations are among the most fundamental functions available to any computer program. For spreadsheets, they are the building blocks for making among other things, financial calculations. The most basic mathematical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. While the focus of this article is how to subtract in Google sheets, the principles apply equally to all four operations. Since subtraction is a mathematical operation, it expects its operands to be numeric. In Google sheets, this means it can be any type found under the Format > Number option. This covers integers, decimal numbers, percentages, currency amounts, dates and time.…

This article explores different methods to convert bytes to megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) in Microsoft Excel, a tool widely used for data management and analysis. We’ll cover simple mathematical formulas, Excel’s built-in functions, and practical tips to make these conversions quick and easy. Let’s go …. In the metric system, units of measure use prefixes like kilo and mega to depict orders of magnitude. This makes referring to and comparing large values or quantities, much easier. Since the metric system uses base 10, the orders of magnitude are 10 to some power, usually one that is divisible by 3,…

There are several ways to Remove Commas in Excel from Numbers or Text. A comma is a separator used to give structure and meaning to both text and numbers. A very large number is easier to read with commas. For example, consider the number 456290713. To read it, you visually try and break down the number into groups of three digits, going from right to left, to determine if the number is in the millions, billions, trillions, etc. If we add commas, the number which now becomes 456,290,713, can now be read without hesitation. In a text document, a comma…

If you are having issues when you go to Print Gridlines in Excel, you are not alone. In fact, this is a common issue that many Excel users face. Spreadsheets are made up of worksheets that comprise data which is arranged in a matrix of columns and rows. If we consider a worksheet with subscriber details for a particular service, the columns will usually signify a particular type or category of information, such as the first and last names, address, email, date the subscriber joined, etc. Rows on the other hand, form a single and complete record about individual subscribers.…

When printing a document, a page break controls where one page ends and a new one begins – Today we’ll go over How to Remove Page Breaks in Excel. In Microsoft Excel, page breaks separate the worksheet into individual pages, ready for printing, and are automatically inserted by Excel, based on the selected paper size, margin settings, and scale options. Page breaks can also be inserted by the user to indicate the end of one section and the start of another, such as when printing out a yearly report, where each month is started on a new page. We will…

Today we’ll be going over how to Fit to Page in Microsoft Excel to get all content onto a page and fit correctly. When writing a document using Microsoft Word (or indeed any other word processing application), we usually don’t worry too much about how the text wraps onto ensuing lines and let the program take care of this automatically for us. When it comes time to print out that document, we can tweak margins and font sizes and get it to fit to page as we want it. Because of the nature of the content, the situation is quite…

Today we’ll be learning How to Flip or Reverse Data in Excel, which refers to the process of reversing the current order of a list or an array of data. This would be a piece of cake in Excel if the data is ordered, but what if it isn’t? While Excel is excellent at reverse sorting, if the data is not already sorted, there is no menu option or function to flip the data. Along the path to solving this problem, we will also take a look at how to flip data in a row. Flip (or Reverse) Data in…

Spreadsheet programs were created to help maintain and organize data in a tabulated format, something that is not easy to do with a word processing program such as Microsoft Word, especially with large datasets. Word processors cannot easily organize data into rows and columns, just as they cannot understand and therefore handle the differences between the data types such as text, integers and scientific numeric representation, date and time, percentages, and currency, which is very important in financial spreadsheets. Not only can spreadsheet programs distinguish between these different data types, but they can also sort them, perform mathematical calculations, and…

Spreadsheets, in many instances, comprise large datasets, on which among other things, is usually performed mathematical operations designed to produce results that can then tell us something about the data. An accounting based spreadsheet will total up revenues and expenses, and produce a financial statement that will indicate if a business is making a profit or loss. A spreadsheet with temperature and precipitation measurements taken over months, can provide a statistical analysis of weather trends. Spreadsheet applications like Microsoft Excel, are equipped with a full array of mathematical functions, as well as allowing us to create formulas of our own…

With any type of data, one of the best and most popular ways of organizing that data is to sort it. Depending on the nature of the data, sorting is usually carried out based on last name, location, category, and date. Sorting arranges the data in a way that makes it easier to find information of interest, or to detect certain patterns in the data. Google sheets makes sorting quite easy with a number of choices available from the Data menu option, as well as through a function. To demonstrate the sorting methods available, and specifically sorting by date, we’ll…

Timestamps are used to log the date and time when information has been accessed or updated. They are commonly found in databases, especially to save the last time a user logged in to the system, or when a record was last updated. There are times however, when they are also useful in spreadsheets. We may want to know when entries in a sheet containing contact details were last updated. This is a perfect case for a timestamp. We’ll be looking at three ways of adding a timestamp to a Google sheet, starting with the simplest using keyboard shortcuts. Next we…

One of the more common tasks in any spreadsheet application is searching through the data. Google sheets already comes with a very neat and powerful find option in the toolbar which searches for a keyword anywhere in the sheet. But there are times however, when you want to do something a bit more complex. Perhaps it’s a search that takes into account two or more columns at the same time. Or you want the search to return a piece of information related to the search term, such as looking up a name and receiving the corresponding email address. Oftentimes, you’ll…

Highlighting duplicates is handy when you are comparing data to see where there’s a match, or going through trying to filter out double entries. We’ll be taking a look at ways Google sheets gives you for doing this using Conditional formatting. We’ll start with a simple, single column example and work on to more complex situations. Our examples will include a small dataset but the principle is the same regardless of whether there are 10 rows or 1000 rows. Conditional Formatting Google sheets offers a conditional formatting option which allows the user to create a rules based formatting strategy based…

Google sheets is a web-based spreadsheet application and part of the Google Docs Editors Suite. It has come into prominence mainly due to the fact that it is free, but also because it allows several users to share and simultaneously edit the same document over the internet. Despite its popularity and rich collection of features, no application is perfect and Google sheets is no exception. One area where Google sheets is sorely lacking is indentation. Indentation is used to make information more readable or to help highlight a hierarchical schema in the data. Microsoft Excel offers a very simple and…

As spreadsheets grow in size, it is very likely that duplicate entries will be created, and depending on the information contained in the sheet, they could pose a problem. At the very least, they will bloat the sheet. You could sort the sheet and then manually go through the rows trying to find and remove any duplicate entries, but this would be time consuming and error prone, especially with a large sheet. It turns out that since this is a very common requirement, Google sheets has a dedicated menu option that takes care of this. We’ll be taking a look…