Author: Constantin Kioulafas

When rows in a spreadsheet with similar information occupy contiguous positions, it is easy to compare the information they contain. Even if they are a few rows apart, it is still possible to do a quick comparison. But as a spreadsheet grows and more rows are added, the distance between rows with information that is of interest, can increase to the point where you need to scroll a fair way up or down in an attempt to compare two or more rows. Obviously, this is highly inefficient, not to mention annoying and a nuisance. You could sort the rows, but…

Google sheets is a web-based spreadsheet application and is part of the Google Docs Editors suite. It is a direct competitor to Microsoft’s Excel, with the major difference being that Google sheets is web-based, and hence allows several users to work online and simultaneously on the same document in real time. One of the most common tasks with any spreadsheet is searching for information. When the sheet is small, a visual check may be enough to find the desired information. However, rarely is a sheet that small, and as with any text based document, a solid search facility is always…

One of the great features of Excel, is its ability to read data from a CSV file. This gives it the ability to import almost any type of information into the spreadsheet. But once it has been imported, it isn’t always in the most suitable format. A point in case is the following sheet which contains names and addresses. While the information is well formatted and readable, it doesn’t lend itself easily if we wanted, for example, to sort the names alphabetically by last name, or the addresses by state. In such cases, it would really help if the names…

Have you ever come across the situation where you have a running total, perhaps the sum of incoming payments, from which you have to subtract values from a range of cells, possibly representing expenditures? Or perhaps you’ve had to make a correction to a series of data values such as temperatures, voltage measurements, or exam grades, by subtracting a value contained in another cell? So, whether subtracting a value from a range or cells, or vice versa, it turns out that Excel can perform both with relative ease. Subtract a single value from a range of cells using a formula…

There’s no denying that a well formatted spreadsheet looks nicer and is easier to read. In the majority of cases, the font size is uniform through the spreadsheet, so it is rare that cell height needs to be adjusted. Cell width however, varies according to the amount of text each cell has to fit, and this is what mainly differs from row to row within the same column, resulting in fields with contrasting lengths in text. It is therefore quite common to resize columns several times during the life-cycle of the spreadsheet. Obviously, it’s not always possible to know exactly…

Often, as an Excel spreadsheet develops and grows, there comes a time when you will need to reorganize and reorder the information contained in the spreadsheet. To do this, you need to be able to move rows and columns, as well as individual cells or ranges of cells, around in the worksheet. As always, there is more than one way to achieve this, and which method is best depends on personal preference. Some users like to use the mouse, while others, the keyboard. In our example spreadsheet, we’ll be taking a look at how to move both rows and columns.…

Excel spreadsheets can grow quite large as data is added, spanning several screenfuls. It can sometimes take a good amount of scrolling (not only vertically but also horizontally), while wading through row after row of data looking for the required bits of information. This can become quite frustrating when trying to compare rows that are disparately located throughout the spreadsheet. And although not as common, scrolling horizontally left and right, can also be just as annoying. A quick solution to the problem is to hide any intervening rows or columns, so that the required information appears in contiguous rows (or…

We get this question quite a bit, “How do i run Multiple IF Statements in Excel?” – So today we’ll go over this in detail about first learning about why you would want to use multiple IF statements in excel or a worksheet. IF is a conditional statement available in almost every programming language. It evaluates an expression, which if true, executes any containing statements. Successive if statements can independently test for a variety of conditions and perform the corresponding actions. IF (condition A is true) perform Action 1 IF (condition B is true) perform Action 2 IF (condition C…

Spreadsheets mainly comprise of tabulated data, so it is only natural that at some point a comparison between the data contained in two columns is going to be required. The data may be weekly or monthly sales figures in a report and there is a need to compare the current period’s figures against those of the previous to produce some kind of indicator. Have sales gone up, have they gone down, or have they remained the same? As with any good software, Excel provides a few ways to perform comparisons and we’ll be taking a close look at these. Before…