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Excel Automation: 10 Tasks You Can Automate Today!

November 29, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment functions intermediate macros tips & tricks vba

Spreadsheets can allow you to analyze data and create reports efficiently. But sometimes the tasks that are involved can be difficult or appear to be time-consuming. The good news is that there’s a lot of automation you can achieve in Excel, and it isn’t always necessary to know how to code in order to do so. Below, I’ll show you 10 types of tasks that you can automate in Excel either on your own or with our help.

1. Cleaning and parsing data

One of the more challenging things in Excel is when you’re dealing with a dataset that may not be easy to manipulate. For instance, if you’ve got text mixed in with numbers or dates that aren’t in the right format, Excel may not interpret or recognize the data properly. But there are many formulas that can help you with that. Rather than manually fixing the data, you can use functions like TRIM, CLEAN, LEFT, MID, and RIGHT to extract what you need while also getting rid of extra, unnecessary spaces and other characters.

If you’re looking for more of a walkthrough of the process, there’s a detailed explanation in this post of how to parse data.

Through the use of formulas, you can save hours that you might otherwise spend trying to clean up your spreadsheet. And the best part is that once you’ve set it up, you can re-use the formulas as you add more data. You don’t need to use macros or complicated coding to clean up; a well-structured template can be enough to do the job for you.

2. Creating simple reports

One of the best features of using Excel is that once you’ve entered data into a spreadsheet, it’s even easier to create a report from it. One example is through the use of a pivot table, where through just a few clicks you can easily summarize your data and split it along different categories. Slicers can make filtering and summarizing data even easier in pivot tables, especially for users who aren’t very familiar with Excel. Forget any manual work here; just a few clicks and you’ve got a report that can quickly summarize information in a table for you!

Alternatively, you can also insert charts easily and Excel will try and select the best one based on your data set. There’s also lots of formatting you can apply to charts so that they have the look and feel that you’re after. And once you’ve got a look that works, you can re-use it over and over again.

3. Creating dynamic dashboards

Dashboards are incredibly popular but they can be complex to set up. Then there’s also the challenge of updating it and making sure the data is up-to-date. It can easily take you hours every time to make sure the information is accurate.

However, in this post, I show you how to create a dynamic dashboard that not only won’t take you hours but that will automatically update as you add data to it. And then, you end up with a report that looks great to send to management to easily review and update.

4. Routine data entry

One of the biggest headaches people can face when using spreadsheets is when they hard-code calculations. A hard-coded calculation is where you don’t reference any cells and just put the result in the cell; it can make it nearly impossible to decipher how that number was calculated (especially if you’re not the person who entered the value). If you go to re-calculate it or update it, you could spend a lot of time just trying to figure out the calculation.

However, by using a formula, there’s no ambiguity as to how a value was calculated. Not only does that save you the time of entering in data but it also makes it easy to correct and update the figure. Ideally, you should minimize the number of places you’re manually entering data into. By doing that, you’ll have a much more robust template where your inputs are kept to a minimum which will eliminate the need for a lot of data entry and your other calculated fields will update automatically. This type of automation doesn’t require complex coding and just needs an Excel spreadsheet to be carefully constructed so that it is efficient and makes the most of formulas.

5. Conditional formatting

Oftentimes you’ll want to color-code your data to highlight things you should be paying attention to. If you’ve got an aged accounts receivable schedule, it is useful to highlight which accounts are more than 90 days overdue. You could manually filter the data and highlight all the cells or rows in red that are overdue, but you can just use conditional formatting to do that for you.

Through conditional formatting, you can create rules to determine when a cell or row should be highlighted in red, when you may want it to be in yellow, or when you may just want to hide the text so that you can easily skip over it. For example, hiding zero values can make it easy to focus on more important numbers.

You can apply many different formatting rules and can even put in a hierarchy to determine if you want to keep applying formatting rules or whether you want to stop if a specific criteria is met. Conditional formatting can be complex but it can be a huge time-saver by allowing you to focus on just the items that are important to you. And once you’ve set up the rules, you don’t need to worry about making changes every time you add new data.

Check out this post to learn about conditional formatting and how you can apply it to your spreadsheet.

6. Updating other workbooks and sheets

If you use multiple workbooks, then another area where you can avoid re-entering data is by linking both workbooks. There are numerous ways that you can do this. One approach involves just linking directly to another worksheet where data will automatically pull from another table.

You can also use the INDIRECT function to reference another worksheet or workbook. Just like with a template, once you set up these formulas and connections, they are there to stay and you can avoid having to manually make changes by yourself.

7. Audit tracking by logging changes

One of the neat features of many Office products is they allow you to track changes that are made. This is normally when you share a workbook with other users. However, through the use of macros, you can have a separate sheet that can tell you which values were changed, when, and by who.

Rather than manually noting these changes or relying on people to make the updates themselves, it doesn’t take much effort through a macro to create a log of what’s been changed.

8. Generating PDFs

One thing many advanced Excel users like to do is to use automation to export reports into PDFs. While there is a way to print to PDF, and it’s particularly easy on the newer versions of Excel, it can be a time-consuming process especially when you need to print out multiple sheets. Here again, with a simple macro, you can auto-generate PDFs and save them in a predefined folder all with the click of a button.

9. Sending emails

Another feature many users like is the ability to use automation to send out emails right from Excel. Through the use of macros, this is also possible. You can create a macro that will enter in the email of the recipient, attach a file, enter the body of the message, and even send the email itself. This can be even set up on a large scale, such as sending out invoices to dozens or hundreds of customers, a process that could easily save you hours worth of work.

10. Just about anything else with VBA

The power of programming in Excel can unlock many different possibilities with what you can automate. Whether it’s using automation to help import data and then manipulating it, creating custom reports, or following a series of complicated steps, there are many tasks in Excel that can be expedited with a few clicks of a button. As long as there’s some logic to the process that you can break into steps, then you can also build that into the code and automate it.

Don’t know where to start? Contact us!

There is significant potential in Excel but not everyone knows how to use automation to make the most of it and to make a spreadsheet as efficient as it can be. You can contact us if you have a certain Excel issue that you need help with or if one of the tasks above has perked your interest and you’d like to learn more. We can help create solutions for you that work efficiently and that can save you many hours, perhaps even days every month.

If you liked this post on 10 Tasks You Can Automate Today, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

2 Excel Functions That Can Eliminate the Need for an Amortization Table

November 17, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment accounting functions intermediate tips & tricks

An amortization table is a useful tool when you need to calculate interest payments, principal payments, and to track the balance that’s owed on a loan. However, you don’t have to create a full schedule to get these values and below I’ll show you two functions that can get you that information quickly and easily. First, let’s start with what a typical amortization schedule looks like.

Creating the amortization schedule

When you set up an amortization schedule, you’ll track the balances, interest, and principal payments. It often looks something like this:

You could use the table to determine what the balance is at the end of period 10 or to add up all the interest payments up until that point. However, there’s another way to arrive at those totals, and that’s using two functions that are available in the newest version of Excel: CUMIPMT and CUMPRINC.

Using the functions

In the amortization schedule, we can see that the ending balance of the $100,000 loan by the end of period 10 is $85,016.67. We can use the CUMPRINC function get to that total as well. The function takes on the following arguments:

To calculate the cumulative principal payments, I’ll enter the formula with the following arguments:

=CUMPRINC(0.05/12,60,100000,1,10,0)

This gives me a total of -$14,983.36. When added to $100,000, it nets out to a balance of $85,016.64 — within just a few cents of the amount on the amortization table. The function gives you the flexibility to specify which periods you want to extract and so you aren’t limited in just tabulating the totals for the first 10 periods or starting from the beginning. You can start from period 13, or the second year, and so on.

If you want to calculate the total interest payments, then that’s where you can use the CUMIPMT function. It has the same arguments as the CUMPRINC calculation, so the formula will look very similar to what’s above:

=CUMIPMT(0.05/12,60,100000,1,10,0)

This tells me that the cumulative interest payments during the first 10 payment periods is $3,887.87. This matches what I would get by adding the interest payments in my amortization table over the same period, this time to the penny.

Should you use these functions instead of an amortization table?

On older versions of Excel, you won’t have access to these functions but if you’re using Microsoft 365 or Excel 2019, then these functions are available and can potentially serve as replacements for an amortization table. Now, if you need the table for audit purposes it may not be possible for you to do without an amortization table completely. But if you’re only generating the table just to determine how much you’ve spent on interest or what your balance will be at some point in the future, then these functions can certainly replace doing a full-blown amortization table.

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How to Use the New Stock History Function in Excel

August 22, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment functions investing stocks

For a while, one of the big advantages Google Sheets had over Excel was the ability to pull stock quotes easily. But that’s no longer the case as there is a new function in Excel that allows you to pull in stock price history. Below, I’ll cover how to use the StockHistory function.

How the function works

The function itself is fairly simple and requires just two arguments at a minimum, and that’s the stock ticker and the start date. By default, the function will return the closing prices from the start date until today. For instance, if I want to pull Tesla’s share price since the start of the year, this is what my formula will look like:

=STOCKHISTORY(“TSLA”,”2020-01-01″)

The formula will then generate an array. Here’s a portion of what it looks like:

Stockhistory function returning Tesla's share price since the start of the year.

If you want to pull just the most recent share price, here’s what you can do:

=STOCKHISTORY(“TSLA”,WORKDAY(TODAY(),-1))

Using the WORKDAY formula you can ensure that you’re going back one business day. You may need to adjust this if you’re on a weekend but basically you just need to manipulate the date to make this work. Note that this doesn’t appear to give you the current day’s close. When I ran this on a Friday, the most recent closing price it returned was from Thursday’s close. It’s clear this function’s intended for historical data rather than live or even delayed stock prices.

If you want to specify an end date for your data, you can enter a date in the third argument, right after the start date.

The function gives you many options, including which data points you want to pull in and what intervals you want. You can pull prices on a monthly or weekly basis by selecting either a 0 (daily), 1 (weekly), or 2 (monthly) for the interval argument. Here’s how I’d pull monthly prices for Tesla:

=STOCKHISTORY(“TSLA”,”2020-01-01″,,2)

Tesla's monthly share price since the start of the year.

It’s important to note that these aren’t monthly averages, they’re just the stock prices as of the end of the specified month. Although the date for the first entry suggests January 1 (the markets weren’t open that day), that’s actually the January 31 closing price.

You can choose whether you want to see the headers and you can also add more fields, including the opening price, the high, the low, and the volume. You can even determine if you want to even see the date (although that’s probably not a good idea when you’re looking at historical data).

It’s easy to make a template with this function since it populates the data for you. Using variables for the ticker, the start date, and the end date, I can quickly set up a sheet that’s easily updatable:

Excel template using the stockhistory function.

The only formula that I enter is the one cell for the STOCKHISTORY function:

=STOCKHISTORY(C2,C3,C4,0,1,0,1,2,3,4,5)

Where C2, C3, and C4 refer to the stock, start, and end dates. The numbers 1 through 5 are needed to ensure that all the fields are extracted.

If you want more details about this function including the different arguments, you can check out Microsoft’s official page for this function.

How can I get other (non-US) tickers?

One of the things you’ll notice from the above examples is that I didn’t enter any prefix for the stock ticker. The StockHistory function knew I was looking for Tesla’s stock price. However, if you want to pull data from other exchanges, including those outside the U.S. markets, you’ll need to add a prefix to make sure that you’re getting the right quote. And since the function won’t actually return the company name, you need to make sure you’re entering the ticker correctly into the function.

Refer to this link for all the different market identifiers. For instance, if I wanted to pull the share price of Air Canada, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, I’d need to enter the ticker as follows:

XTSE:AC

In most cases, it looks as though it’s just an X before the exchange’s usual prefix but you’ll want to double check to make sure.

Why you may not find the StockHistory function on your version of Excel

Since the function’s in beta, StockHistory is not available for most users. You can, however, sign up for Microsoft’s Office Insider program which will give you access to functions while they’re in beta. To join the program, follow the steps outlined here.

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3 Reasons You Should Still Use VLOOKUP

August 15, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment beginner functions index lookups match vlookup

Many people will tell you that you should use INDEX/MATCH instead of VLOOKUP or that you should use a new function like XLOOKUP instead. But you shouldn’t be so quick to ditch arguably the most popular function on Excel as it’s still very useful. Below are just three reasons why VLOOKUP is still incredibly valuable:

1. It’s really quick to set up

If you’re using a combination of INDEX/MATCH, you’re going to have to use two functions, correctly set them up and nest one inside the other. Especially if you’re not used to it, it can take some time to set it up. Sure, it’s not like it’s going to take hours or even minutes to do, but if you need a quick lookup and VLOOKUP can do the job, why not just use it? Here’s how quickly it takes to set it up:

In the above example, I do a VLOOKUP in about five seconds. If you’re setting up INDEX/MATCH, you might still be trying to figure out which column to use for your MATCH argument. Being able to do VLOOKUP without almost thinking is what makes it such a great function, its speed is through the roof. Since you know the first column of your range is where you’re looking up values, it simplifies the process of selecting the columns and then you’re just counting how many columns over you’re extracting data from.

A couple of ways I expedited the formula above is by not typing out the entire function name (just entering VL and then tab to autocomplete the name), using 0/1 instead of typing out True/False and by not closing the last “)” as Excel will automatically do this for you.

Sure, it won’t work in all scenarios such as if you need to go left, that’s a well-known limitation of VLOOKUP. But as long as that’s not the case, there’s really no reason you need to bother with INDEX/MATCH when VLOOKUP will do the job. I’ve been using Excel for decades and I still love to use it when I can because it’s so easy to set up.

2. VLOOKUP is very versatile and will work on old versions of Excel

VLOOKUP may not be able to go left, but it can do wildcard searches and it can work if you need to pull the closest value — this is really useful if you’re dealing with tax brackets or anywhere that you’re looking for the closest value without going over (e.g. where you set the last argument to TRUE to look for approximate matches). While many people may use it strictly for exact matches, VLOOKUP is much more powerful.

And here again, using VLOOKUP in these situations is likely going to be no more difficult than the alternatives. While the temptation may be to use an exciting new function like XLOOKUP, the one big disadvantage is that it’s not available on older versions of Excel. With VLOOKUP, even if you’re working on a version that’s 20 years old you won’t have to worry about whether the formula will work.

3. Ease of use makes it ideal for training novice users and making templates with

Not only is VLOOKUP easy to set up, but it’s easy to understand compared to other, more complicated functions. If you’re making a template or need to train users, you don’t want to worry about them knowing complex formulas, especially when it involves nesting functions. Or telling them about a formula that may not work on their version of Excel. VLOOKUP’s also a good stepping stone for beginners to get them accustomed to how Excel formulas work.

Complex formulas are easy to break and harder for inexperienced users to fix. That’s why VLOOKUP’s ease of use is a key reason it’s worth using. If you’ve ever had to fix someone else’s formulas, you can definitely appreciate that keeping formulas as simple as they need to be can go a long way in making it easy to maintain and fix a spreadsheet.

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Why You Shouldn’t Bother With Excel’s New XMATCH Function

February 8, 2020

by howtoexcel with No Comment functions index intermediate match

Last year, Excel released some updates including the unveiling of XLOOKUP as well as XMATCH. In this post, I’ll show you how to use the XMATCH function and also why you may not have a need for it.

For this example, I’m going to use a list of the stocks with the largest market caps on the U.S. exchanges as of Feb.7, 2020. Here’s what my data looks like:

Top stocks listed on the NYSE and NASDAQ as sorted by market cap.

XMATCH can achieve the same results as MATCH does when looking for data, but if you wanted the same functionality you could just use MATCH. Instead, let’s start by looking at some of the other things that Microsoft claims XMATCH can do.

XMATCH is not a suitable COUNTIF replacement

One of the things that XMATCH can supposedly do is when you’re looking up numbers, it will count the number of times that values fall above or below a threshold. For this example, we will look at the number of stocks on this list with market caps of more than $1 trillion.

To do this, you would use $1,000,000,000,000 as your lookup value and set the third argument of the function, called match mode, to 1, which looks at an exact match or the next larger item. Here’s how the formula looks like:

Where L6 is the cell that has the number that XMATCH will search for (1,000,000). This formula correctly gives me five matches that are more than $1 trillion that appear on the list. However, if I include the header, the results change:

This leads me to believe that it’s still looking for the closest match and not really counting the number of values that meet the criteria. And indeed, when I changed some of the market cap numbers so that they were more than $1 trillion, XMATCH didn’t compute them correctly since they weren’t in descending order. I’m assuming what Microsoft is implying with XMATCH is that if your data is sorted in ascending order, it would be able to tell you where the smallest value is that meets your criteria. For example, The sixth row in the data set was $1.02 trillion and that was the lowest entry that was more than $1 trillion. Technically, if the data was in descending order then everything above that will be more than $1 trillion.

However, that’s very different from actually counting the numbers over that threshold. And that’s why COUNTIF is still vastly superior to XMATCH. Here’s how the two functions worked when I added four additional entries (not in order) of more than $1 trillion, bringing my tally to nine:

In the COUNTIF function, it still correctly counted nine instances where there was more than $1 trillion on the list. XMATCH, meanwhile, continued to point to the sixth row.

These issues are confirmed when we look at the number of values below $1 trillion:

The -1 argument in match mode is the opposite of 1, and it looks at the exact match or next smaller item. However, the results, as you can see, were very different and not what I would have expected. It appeared to point me to the closest number to $1 trillion without going over. COUNTIF, meanwhile, continued to correctly count the number of items that were below $1 trillion. And with 1,000 items in my data set, it makes sense that 991 were below if nine were above the threshold. Unfortunately, that same logic doesn’t work with XMATCH.

As a replacement for COUNTIF, XMATCH gets a fail as it’s clear that it’s not really counting the number of instances. Only under very specific circumstances would the function do that, such as if the data was in descending order. And even then, you’d still need to do a calculation for the header or if you’re looking at the number of items below a threshold. It’s more trouble than it’s worth and COUNTIF has the benefit of also being available in older versions of Excel, even going back to Excel 2000. That’s important if you’ll ever need to work on an older version of Excel.

Using XMATCH to search for text is not any better than using MATCH

If you’re using XMATCH for matching text, it won’t be able to count the instances but you can use it to find the first instance of it. Some companies trade under multiple tickers and you’ll notice Google’s parent company Alphabet shows up twice in this list. Here’s what happens when I try to use the XMATCH function to find the first instance:

I’m using a question mark after the text as that’s what Microsoft instructs users to do when looking for partial matches. However, if I ignore that advice and use an asterisk and specify I’m using a wildcard match, then it appears to fix the issue:

You may be wondering how the regular MATCH function did:

Besides changing the last argument, the functions are nearly identical in how they’re used to find partial matches.

Let’s compare how the functions work when we’re looking at exact matches. For this example, I renamed the multiple Alphabet names so that they only spell out Alphabet with no mention of share classes, e.g. so they’re exactly the same. Here’s how XMATCH does on a simple match calculation:

Comparing MATCH to XMATCH on exact matches.

Here again, there’s little distinction between the two functions.

Microsoft also advertises that XMATCH can be used in an INDEX/MATCH combination, but even that seems kind of pointless.

Using XMATCH with INDEX makes little sense

Let’s use these functions to grab the intersect between the company name and its dividend yield. The name is in column B while the dividend yield is in column G. All the headers are in the first row. Here’s how the formula looks like with the use of XMATCH:

In this example, XMATCH correctly pulled the right percentage for Visa’s dividend yield of 0.59%.

That would be really, really cool if the MATCH function didn’t already do the exact same thing. By getting rid of the X in the XMATCH function, thus making it just a MATCH function, and adding a 0 for the third argument, I get the same exact result:

XMATCH doesn’t improve upon anything when it involves the INDEX and MATCH combination. We’re talking a slight change to the syntax, that’s about it. And again, from a functionality point of view, there’s just no reason to swap a new function in when the existing one works just as well, especially since there’s no backwards compatibility on older versions of Excel for XMATCH.

What XMATCH can do well

Everything that the MATCH function can do, XMATCH can do as well. That’s the good news. There is, however, one thing that XMATCH can do better, and that’s look for data in the reverse order. Here’s a simple example of how both functions work when we’re looking for the first value that contains the word Alphabet:

Both functions correctly yield the same results. Again, the change here is mainly to do with syntax. Under the new XMATCH, if I set the third argument (match mode) to 0 and look for an exact match, I’ll get an error. But if I set it to 2, which is wildcard character match, it will produce the correct result: Alphabet, which first shows up on the fifth row. However, it’s easy to see how this will confuse users who are familiar with MATCH and just use 0 for the third argument, which will also produce the correct result in this case. This is another example of where the syntax has gotten more complicated and not given the user any additional advantage.

The one exception to that, however, is if you want to do a search in the reverse order. MATCH currently will go from the first row and work its way down. Once there’s a match, it will stop there. Here’s how the XMATCH function performs when we’re doing a last-to-first search, as indicated in the fourth argument where the value is -1:

This time XMATCH does correctly pull the sixth row, which is where Alphabet would first show up if we were looking from the bottom and moving up. MATCH, unfortunately, doesn’t have the option to do that and a user would have to rearrange their data to get the same result.

The reverse-order search is the only advantage I can see from testing out XMATCH. Unfortunately, the new function doesn’t add anything significantly new and at worse, it can lead to incorrect results, especially if you’re planning to use it to replace COUNTIF.

Why learning new functions may not be worthwhile, at least not initially

It’s possible that in future updates the XMATCH function will work better but for now, there’s not a whole lot of reason to use it. One of the biggest disadvantages of new functions is that they won’t be helpful to you if you’re working on an older file. It’s not uncommon for people to be working on Excel versions that are more than 10 years old. Not everyone needs the latest-and-greatest version, and mastering a new function may not prove to be worthwhile, especially when older functions work just as well, if not better.

If you liked this post on how to use XMATCH, please give this site a like on Facebook and also be sure to check out some of the many templates that we have available for download. You can also follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

How to Alternate Row Color in Excel

November 28, 2019

by howtoexcel with No Comment conditional formatting formatting functions intermediate

Looking at numbers on a plain white spreadsheet can sometimes make it difficult to differentiate one row from another, especially from afar. It can also make the spreadsheet look a bit bland. That’s why in this post I’ll show you how in Excel you can alternate the color of both rows and columns.

The first step is to create a new conditional formatting rule in Excel

Ultimately, all you need to alternate the row color in an Excel spreadsheet is a little bit of conditional formatting. It just comes down to getting the logic and the formula right in ensuring that the correct rows are highlighted.

To get things started, select Conditional Formatting from the Home Tab and then Create New Rule

home tab excel selecting new rule from conditional formatting menu

Once there, you’ll want to select the option to Use a formula to determine which cells to format:

selecting a formula for conditional formatting in excel

This is where we’ll now enter the formula that we’ll want to use for the alternating rows.

Use the MOD function along with ROW to determine which row to apply a different color to

The key function that we’ll need to use is the MOD function. What this function does is it tells us what the remainder is after a number has been divided by a divisor. This is important because what we need the conditional formatting to do is to evaluate each individual row to tell us whether it is an odd or even number, and the MOD function allows us to do that.

For example, the following formula will return a value of 0:

=MOD(6,2)

Since two divided by six will return a result of three and have no remainder, the result of the formula is 0. If, however, we change the formula to this:

=MOD(6,4)

The formula will now return a value of two, since four only goes into six one time, leaving a remainder of two.

Now, it’s simply a matter of applying this logic to each row. To do this, we need to incorporate the ROW function into our formula as well. The end formula is actually not very complex:

=MOD(ROW(),2)=0

The above formula will be true if the row is an even number, and thus, any conditional formatting we have set for that rule will apply. If we wanted to modify every odd row, then the formula could be tweaked as follows:

=MOD(ROW(),2)=1

You could have two sets of rules, one for odd rows and one for evens, but that’s really not necessary. Instead, you can simply select all the rows and then apply the formatting you want for the even rows, and then create a conditional formatting rule for the odd rows. This way, the formatting you apply to the entire sheet will be overwritten by the conditional formatting rules for the odd rows anyway and your original formatting will end up applying only to the even ones.

Applying a different color to the different rows

Once you’ve created your rule, then it’s just a matter of selecting the formatting you want to use and how you want to highlight the rows. I’d suggest a color that is light so that you don’t have too much contrast. This is how my Excel spreadsheet looks after applying a light blue color to every alternate row. I’ve left the default formatting in place for the odd rows.

conditional formatting alternating rows highlighted

If your spreadsheet doesn’t look like this, check to make sure that you have applied the conditional formatting to the entire sheet and that it isn’t only to a select few rows or cells. If you’re unsure about this, refer back to my earlier post on conditional formatting to help give you a better idea of how it works.

You can highlight alternate columns in a different color too

As you may have guessed, the same logic and conditional formatting rules that we used above can be applied to columns as well. Instead of the ROW function we just need to use the COLUMN function in our formula. That’s really the only difference as the formula will look nearly identical:

=MOD(COLUMN(),2)=1

You’ll follow the same steps as far as creating a new conditional formatting rule, but the process is largely the same. The one thing that you’ll notice, however, is that if you have both rules in place, your conditional formatting has now overlapped:

conditional formatting overlap for both columns and rows in blue

In the above example, the formatting is the same color, but if they were different, the overlap would stand out even more. And that’s where it may take some experimenting with different formats to ensure that you get the right overlap and that the different formatting rules blend well together. Assuming, of course, that you want both rules in place.

Other options to alternate the row and column color in Excel

While this post showed you how to change colors for odd and even rows and columns, you can certainly extend that logic even further. For instance, you could decide to highlight every third row by changing the MOD function so that you’re dividing by three rather than two. As long as the logic is sound, you can modify these formulas so that they alternate the rows that you want.

For example, if you wanted to alternate the color of every fifth row and every 13th row on your Excel spreadsheet, you could create one conditional formatting rule to apply to every fifth row and then another for every 13th one as well. Although putting this into one larger formula is possible, it would a bit cleaner to put them into different rules.

When it comes to conditional formatting, there’s a lot of flexibility in how you can structure how your spreadsheet works. However, you also don’t want to get too carried away and make the spreadsheet too colorful and difficult to read. Otherwise, it may end up defeating the purpose and making your spreadsheet less user-friendly.

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How to Use the New XLOOKUP Function

October 15, 2019

by howtoexcel with One Comment functions index intermediate lookup lookups match vlookup

Forget using VLOOKUP or even INDEX and MATCH, Excel users can now use XLOOKUP!

Knowing how to use VLOOKUP has become almost a basic skill for Excel users. If you’re an intermediate or advanced user, you probably use INDEX & MATCH because of the limitations that are inherent with just using VLOOKUP. Since VLOOKUP can only return values to the right of what the value that you’ve found, it’s a less-than-optimal formula. You can either re-arrange your data, or you can use INDEX & MATCH. It’s a more flexible solution, but it’s also not ideal. After all, you’re now combining multiple Excel functions into one.

Enter: XLOOKUP

XLOOKUP is the solution that Excel users have been looking for…for decades. What the function does is allow you to do what was possible with INDEX & MATCH all in one simple formula.

Let’s go over it with some sample data on the world’s largest cities:

list of the largest cities in the world — Data courtesy of Wikipedia

Doing a regular lookup vs XLOOKUP

Here’s how my formulas would look like if I wanted to return the Country using a value from the City field:

vlookup and index match doing a regular lookup

In the above example, E5 refers to the capital city value. While the INDEX & MATCH combination works, it may not be the easiest for novice users who aren’t comfortable with nesting functions. Here’s how the same calculation would look using XLOOKUP:

It’s a much simpler solution. The first argument takes the value you want to look for, followed by the range where you want to search for it, and then the range that you want to extract the corresponding value from. There’s no need to enter a column number the way you do with VLOOKUP, nor is there a need to add another function.

There are optional arguments you can use including how you want to match (see the next section). You can also choose the direction that the lookup goes, in case you don’t want to look in the same order as your data:

Using wildcards in XLOOKUP

Like with the other functions, you can also incorporate wildcards into XLOOKUP as well. Wildcards work similarly among all three formulas, but the key difference is that XLOOKUP has multiple arguments for its fourth (optional) argument which dictates how you want the data extracted. Entering ‘2’ will tell the function that you want to use a wildcard. Below are the options for the match_mode argument (optional):

0: exact match
-1: exact match or next smaller item
1: exact match or next larger item
2: wildcard character match

Here’s a comparison of how you’d get the same result using all three functions using a wildcard:

using wildcards in xlookup vlookup and index match

The logic is the same in the sense that you’ll want to use a wildcard character like * around the term you’re trying to find a match of. In the above example, I used the * around the entire wildcard, and it returned the population for New Delhi in that example.

XLOOKUP here is actually a bit more complicated as with the other functions you didn’t need to specify that you were using a wildcard. Taking out the ‘2’ from the argument would result in XLOOKUP yielding an #N/A error. However, it could be that doing this will make it more efficient.

Finding the closest matches

One of the other options for the matches mentioned above were finding the next smaller or next larger matching items if an exact one wasn’t found. A good example of this is where you’re looking for something like a tax rate where you won’t find every possible income level that someone might enter and you need to ensure that it falls into the correct range.

Here are some sample categories:

If I entered an amount of $17,000, it should put me in Tier 3, since that would be the threshold I would have reached under this hierarchy. Here’s an example of how this would be calculated in the three functions:

doing a lookup for tax brackets using xlookup vlookup and index match

All three formulas were able to return the same tier correctly, however, INDEX & MATCH is a bit more cumbersome again due to having multiple functions within it.

The advantage that XLOOKUP has here is that I can select the category that’s either directly below or above the amount I enter, effectively rounding up or down, simply by changing the fourth argument between a ‘1’ (exact or next largest item) to a ‘-1’ (exact or next smallest item).

This is not possible with VLOOKUP, and in order for this to be able to work with INDEX & MATCH, I’d have to change the order from ascending to descending. But what’s impressive is that XLOOKUP is able to find the correct category even if the values are not in any sort of order at all.

Have a look at what happens when I try to completely destroy any sort of hierarchy:

This is an absolutely dreadful hierarchy that’s not consistent in any way possible. Do the formulas have any chance of getting it right? Here’s how the results looked:

xlookup index and match doing a lookup for next smallest category

Both the INDEX & MATCH as well as the XLOOKUP formulas were looking for the closest matches. INDEX & MATCH returned the lowest tier, which technically was incorrect since $17,000 came in higher than $10,000, which was Tier 2. And XLOOKUP, despite the mess of a hierarchy, was still able to pull out the correct group.

Ultimately, you never want to organize your data in such a horrible way, but this helps demonstrate just how strong XLOOKUP is, to be able to still come out with the correct calculation.

And just for fun, let’s flip the formulas around, this time looking for an exact match or the next largest category:

xlookup index and match doing a lookup for next largest category

There wasn’t a Tier 3 in my incomplete table, but XLOOKUP still found the next largest Tier which was at $25,000 – Tier 5. INDEX & Match found its way into Tier 7.

Creating a dynamic formula

One of the great things about INDEX & MATCH is that you can index an entire database and then dynamically change which column you want to extract from based on a selection and not have to update the range in the formula. For example:

Why would you want to do this? The beauty of it is that you can change what value you extract based on your selection. Since you’re doing a match, it will look for that field and adjust the column accordingly using the OFFSET function:

You can do this in XLOOKUP as well, and here’s how that formula would compare to index and match:

The XLOOKUP formula is a bit more complicated as it needs two ranges, and thus, two OFFSET functions are needed. In the INDEX & MATCH combination, only one OFFSET function is needed as it only requires a column number for one of its arguments. Either way, you still need to be familiar with using OFFSET so it’s probably not a dealbreaker if XLOOKUP is a bit longer.

Great, so how do I get XLOOKUP?

There are two things you need to be able to get access to XLOOKUP:

Office 365
Enrollment in the Office 365 Insiders Program

It’s not an exclusive club or anything, all you have to do is to follow the steps outlined here. By selecting the ‘Insider’ option rather than Monthly, you’ll get more frequent updates and changes. Once you’ve got it set up, then it’s just a matter of waiting for the updates to roll out to you. There’s, unfortunately, no notification, I’d just suggest checking every now and then to see if XLOOKUP shows up in your functions list.

Caveat

One of the things you should remember, however, is that while it may be great to use XLOOKUP, old versions of Excel won’t have access to this flashy new function. And so it’s important to still be familiar with using VLOOKUP and INDEX and MATCH.

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Calculating and Tracking Streaks with a Custom Function

February 28, 2018

by admin with No Comment functions offset sum vba

With the stocks markets tanking earlier this month, I thought it’d be interesting to track their historical performance and put into perspective just how badly things have been going lately. For those that don’t know, one of my side jobs is writing articles for the Motley Fool Canada and so naturally this example attracted my interest.

However, there’s not an easy way to calculate this in Excel, and so I decided to go the route of a custom function.

What I’m going to be looking to accomplish is a way to to track how many consecutive trading days that a stock has been up or down, and then also calculate the cumulative value of those gains and losses.

If you’d like to follow along with my example, you can download the file I used here (you’ll have to save the file, open it in Excel and enable content, otherwise you’ll see NAME? errors)

Setting Up the Variables

I want the calculation to start from the bottom (the current cell) and work its way back up, since the latest results will be at the bottom. To do this I create a ‘bottom’ variable that looks like this:

————————————————————————————————————–

bottom = selection.Count + selection.Row – 1

————————————————————————————————————–

I want the user to be able to select what range they want the calculation to apply to, rather than selecting everything.

I also setup a variable for the column, which I named as offsetnum:

————————————————————————————————————–

offsetnum = selection.Column

————————————————————————————————————–

These two variables allow me to set my starting point for my calculation.

Determining if I’m Counting Negatives or Positives

The value of the starting cell will determine if I am going to be looking for positive numbers (gains) or negatives (losses), and so I setup an if statement to determine whether the first value is a gain or loss:

————————————————————————————————————–

If Cells(bottom, offsetnum) < 0 Then
posneg = “negative”
Else
posneg = “positive”
End If

————————————————————————————————————–

Start counting

The final step involves counting the values depending on whether I’m looking for positives or negatives:

————————————————————————————————————–

For counter = bottom To 1 Step -1

If posneg = “negative” Then

If Cells(counter, offsetnum) < 0 Then
streak = streak – 1
Else
Exit For
End If

Else

If Cells(counter, offsetnum) >= 0 Then
streak = streak + 1
Else
Exit For
End If

End If

Next counter

————————————————————————————————————–

My complete function looks as follows:

————————————————————————————————————–

Function streak(selection As Range)

Application.Volatile
Application.Calculate

Dim bottom, offsetnum As Integer
Dim posneg As String

bottom = selection.Count + selection.Row – 1
offsetnum = selection.Column

‘Determine first value
If Cells(bottom, offsetnum) < 0 Then
posneg = “negative”
Else
posneg = “positive”
End If

For counter = bottom To 1 Step -1

Next counter

End Function

————————————————————————————————————–

Calculating consecutive points gains and losses

Now that I have a function to tell me the current winning or losing streak, I can calculate the cumulative gains and losses.

To do this, I am going to sum as far as the streak goes. And so far starters, I’m going to start with the SUM function. I am also going to use the OFFSET function because I need to determine how many rows up I need to add. The OFFSET will start from the current position and determine how far back I need to go to add up the totals in the current streak.

However, because some streaks are negative, I’ll need to also use the ABS function to just grab the number, regardless of if it is positive or negative. My formula looks like this so far:

=SUM(OFFSET(H2,1-ABS(I2), 0

Column H is where my gain or loss value is, while column I is the streak value. Since I want to sum the cumulative gains, I need to reference column H as my starting point.

I added the 1- before the ABS function because that will ensure the number is a negative, meaning that my formula will calculate upward, rather than downward if the number were positive. I also have to decrease the number of cells to offset because I don’t want to include the current cell, otherwise the formula will go too far.

Since I’m not offsetting any columns I set the next argument to 0.

The last argument I need to enter is the height of the offset function, otherwise the formula will just offset by the number specified in the second argument and pull that value, rather than pulling all the values that fall within the range.

This actually involves just copying the same argument again, but this time for the height. My completed formula looks as follows:

=SUM(OFFSET(H2,1-ABS(I2),0,ABS(I2)))

Note

Sometimes with custom functions you might notice that your calculations hang or stop computing correctly. What that means is you just need to recalculate using either F9 or you can edit in the cell and click enter, which will normally trigger a recalculation as well.

Alternatively what you could do is after running the formulas for the dataset, copy them over as values to ensure that they don’t change, since in this case you likely wouldn’t need to recalculate the streak value again.

Loan and Savings Formulas – PV, FV, and PMT

May 28, 2017

by admin with No Comment beginner functions

In a previous post I covered my amortization/depreciation template.

Here I will cover how to do present value and future value calculations that are used in that template. I will start with a savings example. Suppose I want to accumulate $500,000 in savings at the end of 25 years after making monthly payments. I will assume an average interest rate of 3%. My inputs will be as follows:

Present Value (current savings) = 0
Future value (target savings) = $500,000
Number of payments (n) = 300 (25 years * 12 monthly payments a year)
Interest Rate (i) = 0.25% (3%/12 months)

Payment Calculation

To determine the size of the payment I need to be making to ensure I meet my target calculation, I will need to use the PMT (payment) formula. With the above inputs, my formula will look as follows:

=-PMT(0.0025,300,0,500000)

I enter a negative before the formula to ensure my value will be positive. This yields a result of $1,121.06. I could add an additional argument to say that the payments are at the beginning of the period as opposed to the end. All I need to do is add a another argument with the number 1, as shown below:

=-PMT(0.0025,300,0,500000,1)

The result would be $1,118.26; a difference of less than $3 a payment.

Future Value Calculation

I can test my calculations by now doing a future value calculation. My inputs remain the same, except now I have a payment amount. The future value formula will look as follows:

=FV(0.0025,300,-1121.06,0)

I have made the payment amount negative so that the formula results in a positive number. My future value equals 500,001.53, confirming that I will reach the target amount with this payment amount. I could also change the payment number from 300 to 150, to determine how much I will have amassed halfway:

=FV(0.0025,150,-1121.06,0)

This tells me I will have a balance of $203,723.81 after 150 payments.

I’ll switch over to another example now. Let’s assume you have a mortgage and want to know what your balance is today. You can use a similar calculation, except this time you will have a negative present value and don’t know your future value (today’s value). Suppose a mortgage of $250,000, a 30 year mortgage with monthly payments (n=360), an interest rate of 5% and payments of $1,342.05 (this can be calculated in much the same way as the payment calculation was done for the first example).

My inputs are as follows (assume I want to know the balance halfway through the mortgage, after payment 180):

Present Value (mortgage amount): $250,000
Number of Payments (n) = 180 (15 years * 12 monthly payments a year)
Interest Rate (i) = 0.4167% (5%/12 months)
Payment = $1,342.05

The formula is as follows:

=FV(0.004167,180,1342.05,-250000)

Again you will notice the present value amount is negative here. This is because this is the amount owing. If this was the same sign as the payment amount the balance would increase rather than decrease. This calculation tells my the mortgage balance after 180 payments, or halfway through the mortgage would be $169,709.77. You may notice slightly different amounts because of the interest rate you use. In the above example I rounded to 0.004167 however if you reference the cell that has the interest rate calculation rather than a hard-coded number you will get a more accurate result.

Present Value Calculation

I will move on now to a present value calculation. In this example, I want to determine what mortgage amount can be afforded based on a specific monthly payment. Suppose I want the monthly payment to be $2,000; the term to again be 30 years; the interest rate to still be 5%. With these inputs I can determine what mortgage amount I can afford based on those assumptions. My formula will be as follows:

=PV(0.004167,360,-2000,0)

In the formula above I again set the payment amount to a negative so that the formula gives me a positive number. The result is a value of $372,563.23.

When doing these calculations you are always better off referencing formulas for interest rate calculation as opposed to hard-coded numbers. As you will notice, even a slight difference in the interest rate can have a big impact on your result, especially when dealing with a large number of payments. I have hard-coded examples in all of the examples here only for illustrative purposes but in practice I would recommend avoiding hard-coding an interest rate.

Calculating Date Differences Using VBA

February 26, 2017

by admin with No Comment dates functions vba

In VBA there is a custom DateDiff function that allows you to easily calculate the difference between dates – whether you want the difference to be in days, weeks, months, years, it is easier to accomplish this in VBA than through regular Excel formulas. I have piggy-backed off the DateDiff function to make a custom function in Excel that makes it easy to use as a formula in your spreadsheet.

The custom function I have created is called datecalculation and consists of three arguments: start date, end date, and interval. The interval determines how the difference is calculated. The interval needs to be in quotations and use one of the following codes:

Below is an example of how the function work when computing the difference between January 1, 2016 (cell C2) and January 1, 2017 (cell C3). The interval codes are in column A.The result column is the date difference according to the selected interval.

To make this function work in your spreadsheet simply insert the following VBA code. If you are not sure how to do that, please refer to this post, specifically the section about inserting VBA code.

————————————————————————————————————————

Function datecalculation(date1 As Date, date2 As Date, interval As String)

datecalculation = DateDiff(interval, date1, date2)

End Function

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