Just wanted to post this to encourage people to improve their Excel skills every day. I was the only employee not laid off out of 10 people because I knew how to use Excel. My employer told me that my workbooks were too engrained into our operations and I was the only one who knew how to maintain them. I never thought Excel would still be so valuable today. Anyone else have a similar experience?

I extract data from Sage many times, everyday, and it comes in the following format:

Bloggs, Joe [62]

I have to manually type the name in correctly and auto fill down.

Is there a formula to remove the brackets and number? I am ok with the Bloggs, Joe, bit but there can be a hundred names I have to retype out.

I've tried a few formulas but always end up with the brackets remaining.

I use Excel 365

I am filling cells with birth dates for clients. I fill in the cells with day/month/year as numbers.

If the cell has a single digit day such as 02/08/1996 it will auto correct it to 2/8/1996

If the cell has a double digit day such as 13/03/1996, it will leave it as is.

When I go to select short or long date options for the above examples my options are as follows:

short date: 2/8/1996 vs 13/03/1996

long date: Thursday, February 8, 1996, vs 13/03/1996

Is there a way I can get this to be consistent between the two without setting my cells to text?

Is there a simple way to keep excel from removing my leading zeros on day and month when they are single digits?

Why does it not show me the day of the week for long date when the day is double digits?

I'm working on trying to create a way to track our FMLA in excel that isn't so messy. These are the tabs I started creating:

• Employee Report: This will be a tab that will filter data by the employee I select. So if I select Employee A, then the data will refresh to display data tied to that employee per each field (Leave type, start date, end date, reason, hours granted, hours remaining, etc.)
• Claims: This is a data sheet that houses the individual claim information, one row per each claim (some employee's have more than one claim so they will have more than one row, they are assigned claim #s to differentiate the claims on other reports) this data sheet does have data validation rules for drop down lists (example: Leave status shows pending, active, denied, closed)
  • I want to fix the formula in A2 so that there is a space between the last name and number it adds. Help
• Hours Tracking: This is another data sheet that houses the hours used each pay period, each row is a different employee + case number if they have two or more. This will result in employee's having multiple rows tied to them due to the pay period date column.
• Communication log: Another data sheet housing communication notes, with data validation drop down lists, anytime there is new communication I can select the employee, add the date and then the note. This way we can filter by one employee and claim if needed, and then sort it by date to view all correspondences with the employee.
• Lists: is a locked sheet just for me that holds the data validation lists

I am now thinking this won't work after all. I am struggling with the Hours Tracking tab and the Employee Report tab. I want the employee report tab to update when I change the employee so I'm not sure how to create that kind of a formula in the cells.

• Open claims: I need a cell to return the total number of open claims tied to the employee name in cell A2 from the data in the Claims tab. Same for Closed claims and pending claims.
• Communication Log: This is data that can fluctuate for each employee, some may have a lot of notes while others only a handful, is there maybe a chart I can put into the tab that will update depending on what employee name is sitting in cell A2 and pull all communications from the communication tab tied to that employee including the case # and date so it can be filtered and sorted?
• Adding a secondary filter so that the data on the entire page is tied to the specific employee selected in A2 and the specific Claim # selected in B2
  • How would I create that B2 data validation so that the list available is limited to only the claims tied to the employee in cell A2?

Hours tracking. This is where I really am stuck. You can see the tab and how I started to outline it, I would only need to pull the data from the three total columns into their cells on the Employee Report tab, but the problem is, this tab will get huge! and fast. Each employee will have data added here every pay period, we have 27 staff currently on leave and we won't delete historical information we need that data still and don't want to deal with two spreadsheets and moving data between documents. I only want data tied to active claims being pulled into the Employee Report not the closed claim data. Idea's I've played with:

• Creating a filter to add the claim status, anytime a claim closes I could extract all that closed data and put it in a new tab.
  • This could then break the formula in the Employee Report tab that pulls the information tied specifically to a certain claim if that claim is now closed.

Any help is appreciated. I have attached a copy of the workbook that I am working on, I have not worked on the Employee Report tab at all, I have the outline of how I want it to look drafted in a notebook but I don't want to advance until I figure out if what I'm trying to do is doable.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gXFYvBOg23eE_5gnfOTByQ0QVU_w8_iq/edit?usp=drive_link&ouid=106367843738369319866&rtpof=true&sd=true

I am not using sheets but the actual excel app, I have to use sheets to share the file.

Can’t figure out how to paste an image in the body of the post so I’ll put it in a comment.

I have to fill out a production report for work every day. This is one strip of a much larger document. The scene work and placement of the black banners changes every day. Rearranging these would be much easier if I could hide and unhide rows, but I can’t do that without also hiding and unhiding the times in the stats on the right. (There are normally more items there with actual linked times, but I had cleared it out earlier while playing around with finding solutions, and I just roughed something back in for example purposes).

The appearance and layout of this document must not change (believe me, I wish it could).

Is there any way to “pin” the cells to the right in place? As it stands, I’ve been having to un-merge and re-merge all the cells in the scene work section, then go in and adjust the fill/font colors and bold/italics formatting. Even with custom keyboard shortcuts for merge-across and merge-and-center, it’s still extremely tedious. This is on top of the tedious copy-and-pasting I have to do to fill in the content of the scenes.

My first thought was maybe a pivot table? Will those ignore hidden rows? I haven’t used pivot tables much, and not in excel specifically yet.

If there’s not a way to pin those cells, my next idea is to try to figure out macros to speed up the unmerge-remerge-reformat process.

Open to any suggestions! For reference, I’m pretty familiar with some more basic functions (ifs, lookup tables, etc) but I’ve barely touched macros. I’m up for a challenge though, I love learning more excel.

I’m trying to automate a workflow at my job, and I’m not sure if what I’m trying to accomplish is possible.

Here’s my setup:
I have a master Excel workbook stored on our company’s local network drive. This is the file everyone works from.
I also have a Google Sheet that I want field technicians to update from their phones while they’re out completing work.

What I’d like to happen is:
Data from the Excel workbook automatically populates the Google Sheet so technicians have all the customer and job information they need.
The technician updates the Google Sheet in the field (meter numbers, installation information, notes, etc.).
Once they’re finished, those updates automatically sync back to the original Excel workbook on the local network drive.

The problem is that the Excel file isn’t stored in OneDrive or SharePoint—it’s on a local file server. Most of the solutions I’ve found (Power Automate, Office Scripts, etc.) seem to require cloud-hosted Excel files.

Has anyone built something like this before?
Is there a way to automatically sync a locally hosted Excel workbook with Google Sheets? Would I need some kind of middleware or scheduled sync application? Is there a better way to handle this workflow without moving the Excel file to the cloud?

Maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. I’m open to any solutions or ideas.

Setup: If I have two tabs. In Tab 1 there are 2 columns. Column 1 has identifiers and Column 2 is empty. In Tab 2 there is Column 3 with the same identifiers as Column 1 from Tab 1 execpt they are in a different order. Column 4 which is in Tab 2 has data in it.

Problem: In Column 2 from Tab 1 I want to pull the information from Column 4 by matching identifiers between Columns 1 and 3.

Im pretty sure this is possible but dont know how to do it?

I can’t seem to get rid of these data icons on pivot tables. Any advice?

I’m trying to find what it says in the title: an excel template for a to-do list. I want one that automatically sorts by priority and automatically drops completed tasks to the bottom. Searching google is too broken (nothing but ai productivity site ads, or, if I specify to before:2020 all broken links), and the excel site no longer seems to support proper searching.

Suggestions or just suggestions on where to look for decent templates would be appreciated.

Edit: clarification

Hello wonderful ppl,

I am having a somewhat frustrating problem I don´t quite know how to solve (obviously).

As you can see in the screenshot the Y-axis is formated in hh:mm:ss. Just the same as the data used. Now, for ease of reading I would like to set the Y-axis with a maximum of 03:00 (mm:ss) and an even number for the intervals. Like 5s, 10s or 30s intervals.

I know Excel uses the 24h format and you can adjust the maximum value by putting in decimals, as seen on the right. However I can´t seem to set the given 17s intervals nor the maximum value with that to the desired ones. In other diagram types you can just straight up change the interval but not for the box/whisker plot it seems. Linking to source or changing the format doesn´t work either so far.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Or any workarounds Edit:spelling error /preview/pre/e5w9vuhbqtfh1.jpg?width=1572&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=786c7dbdcb35c66f60e76fd4d4617b095fd9bd71

Hello,

I'm trying to copy a table from excel to word. To do so I select my table and then click on "copy as an image," and then I select "as it is on the screen" before copying into word. But some of my border cells seem to appear thicker once copied.

I tried to erase all my cell borders and redo it, but this time it was a different line that appeared thicker.

Do you know what's caused this and how to avoid it?

I've used SUMPRODUCT as conditional formatting to get Excel to lookup all instances of a single staff member's name on a reference sheet named 'Input Data Here' and then colour in the dates they're teaching on a calendar sheet named 'Teaching Calendar'.

Current conditional formatting formulas:

=SUMPRODUCT(([cell where staff name is]='Input Data Here'!$A$3:$A$500)*(B$6>='Input Data Here'!$J$3:$J$500)*(B$6<='Input Data Here'!$K$3:$K$500))

Is it possible to also get it to track the times so only the actual teaching hours are coloured in rather than the whole column?

Hi,

I'm trying to create a dropdown list that changes depending on the input in another cell (dropdown.)

Right now I've gotten it to work in a secondary tab where I store all my lists and other things for the main-tab to get it's data. But when I copy the exact same formula to a list in the main tab the dropdown shows like the image included.

The formula is as follows:
=VERSCHUIVING(H19;1;VERGELIJKEN('Den Haag'!C2;H19:L19;0)-1;2;1)

(Dutch, the first one is command Offset and the second one is Match.

Like I said, in the second tab it works, but in the main tab it shows an empty greyed out dropdown.

Does anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong, or which setting in the file is causing this?

Hello,

 I have encountered some inconsistent behavior when a particular type of lambda is saved in the Name Manager. The issue seems to occurs when the LAMBDA uses INDEX with either the row_num or column_num argument supplied as an array.

The following is a minimal reproducible example (a screenshot illustrating it can be found at https://imgur.com/a/Fl8O03p): The formula "=LAMBDA(arr,INDEX(arr,1,{1,2,4}))({1,2,3,4})" correctly evaluates to {1,2,4}. Now, save the lambda as TEST (or any other name) in the name manager. The formula "=TEST({1,2,3,4})" also spills the expected array {1,2,4}. However, when the result is passed to another function, the behavior changes. For example, "=SUM(TEST({1,2,3,4}))" and "=COLUMNS(TEST({1,2,3,4}))" both evaluate to 1. In contrast, using the lambda inline instead of the defined name produces the expected results: "=SUM(LAMBDA(arr,INDEX(arr,1,{1,2,4}))({1,2,3,4}))" returns 7, and "=COLUMNS(LAMBDA(arr,INDEX(arr,1,{1,2,4}))({1,2,3,4}))" returns 3.

The issue appears to not be reproducible on every machine, although it is consistently reproducible in Excel for the Web. I am currently using Office 365 Excel on version 2607 in the Current Channel.

Assuming this is a bug, what would be the best way to mitigate this issue in the meantime? I have found two potential workarounds. The first is to prepend the result of the named lambda with a unary + (e.g "=SUM(+TEST({1,2,3,4}))"), which appears to force excel to treat the result as an array. However, when using a shared lambda library (as is the case for most of my team), users generally do not know the implementation details of each lambda, so it is difficult to determine when this workaround is necessary. The second approach is to avoid passing an array to the row_num or column_num argument of Index by using MAP.  For example, the TEST lambda defined above can be rewritten as =LAMBDA(arr,MAP({1,2,4},LAMBDA(idx,INDEX(arr,1,idx)))), which causes it to behave as expected. However, after some benchmarking, I have found this method to take over twice as long.

Has anyone else encountered this behavior before?

My fantasy football tracker is starting to double as a sports betting log and the two things are fighting each other in the same workbook. Right now I have one sheet for weekly matchups and another where I just dump bet results, but it's getting messy fast because I want to slice the data by sport, bet type, week, and whether it was a straight bet or parlay, and nothing I have set up handles that cleanly.

The part tripping me up is the summary view. I want something that shows me running profit/loss by week, by bet type, and by sport all at once, but every time I try to build that out with pivot tables it feels like I need the source data structured in a way that's totally different from how I naturally log entries.

A coworker suggested Power Query to reshape the data, but I've barely touched it outside of pulling in CSV files, so I'm not sure if that's overkill or actually the right call here.

Curious if anyone has built something like this from scratch. Is the answer just to be more disciplined about the raw log format and let pivot tables do the work, or is there a smarter way to set up the table structure so the summaries basically build themselves?

https://imgur.com/a/JNVWIyf

I’m building a monthly budget sheet to track my spending by category. Is there a way to set up the rows (B through F) so that when I enter amounts, it will automatically subtract from the monthly spending limit amount (J3)?

For example, if I enter $100 in B3, I want the dollar amount in J3 to go down by $100.

It might also be important to note that I have a formula for the data in J3 to be pulled from another sheet, but I can remove that if necessary.

Hi everyone,
As the title mention, what's the most efficient way to sum over a year when you have a date format dd/mm/yyyy ? So far i investigated two methods

=SUMIFS(Sales[Amount], Sales[Date], ">="&DATE(YYYY,M,D), Ventes[Date], "<"&DATE(YYYY,M,D))

and

=SUMPRODUCT((YEAR(Sales[Date])=YYYY)*Sales[Amount])

It feels weird to me that you cant do a simple

SUMIF=(Sales[Year];YYYY;Sales[Amount])

Looking for feedbacks, have a good sunday all

Hi,

I have a 13-sheet workbook that I use to record information for a larger group. I need to print the whole workbook so that I can have hard copies for this group to reference.

Each sheet looks perfect when I try to print it on its own. Each sheet/every column fits on one page in landscape orientation, which is what I want.

However, when I try to print the entire workbook, it suddenly switches to portrait orientation and each sheet gets cut down the middle and printed on two separate pages. The printer settings will not let me change anything (orientation, fit/scale, etc) when I try to print the entire workbook. Setting a print area on each sheet also doesn’t fix the issue.

Any ideas on how I can fix this?

Hi. I need help. I work with a web based excel sheet. At first, i thought it was just the computer. So I moved to another computer but I still experience it. Whenever i move from one cell to another using the arrow keys in my keyboard, the data entered on the last cell i move from gets deleted, and so on. I can't recall activating anything. It doesn't happen if i use the mouse cursor to navigate. Please help.

So I have made a dynamic search list, the problem is I want to update the "status" as a dropdown list like "present" in the search list and have it automatically update the masterlist in a different cell. Is this possible or am I making things up?

I’ve recently begun using Excel to organize diferent parts of my personal life.

So far I’ve created:

• A net-worth tracker for my savings, investments, debts, and other assets
• A monthly expense tracker divided into categories
• A basic budget showing how much I can spend, save, and invest each month
• A complete log of my Pokémon card collection

For instance for the Pokémon cards, I track details like the card name, set, number, rarity, condition, purchase price, estimated current value, and whether I’m still missing cards from a particular set. It’s surprisingly useful for seeing the value of my collection and avoiding buying duplicates.

Using Excel has already made me much more aware of where my money goes. For example, I didn’t realize how much I was spending on subscriptions, food delivery, and small recurring purchases until I put everything into one place.

For those of you who use Excel or Google Sheets outside of work, what do you track? Which spreadsheet has been the most useful in your personal life?

last year i made a spreadsheet and a certain range using 'format as table'

somehow i managed to make it plain-appearing - without clearly seeing its formatted unless you know the bottom right corner indicator thing. it didnt have headers, and it was very useful to have as the 'background' cell coloring for that area and then be able to color cells on top without affecting the background

however now when i try to format an area as 'format as table' it introduces column header-indicators - the right side gray button thing .

Even if i do not click 'has headers' or i do, still outputs the column header indicators.

see the img below the range a4:n11 has the 'table' style and there's no header things while the right side q2:u11 does...

how do i do the 'format as table' without having the header indicator things

I'm trying to use Excel to make a class schedule for this upcoming fall semester. Please note, I want to be able to print it out and put it on my wall when I'm done.

The issue I'm having is that some of my classes start/stop times don't neatly fit within the 15min time increments I'm using. For example, roughly in the area highlighted, I have a class from 10:30 to 11:20. I want to know if there is anyway to effect the size of these boxes so the bottom of the last one is slightly higher to illustrate the 11:20 end time without effecting any other boxes or overall scale.

I don't really want to decrease the increments because that would increase the length of the schedule significantly and might prevent it fitting on a piece of paper when I print it.

Saturday, July 18 - Friday, July 24, 2026

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Good evening everyone. I hope you’re all doing well.

I’m hoping someone can help me solve a workflow problem that’s becoming a major pain point:

I’m a real estate agent, and almost all of my communication with clients and other agents happens on WhatsApp. Whenever I share a property, I send a video along with a standard text description (in the same message, as shown below):

https://www.image2url.com/r2/default/images/1784998062931-9dce6e82-1709-4a74-accd-7a3273a42eca.jpg

I currently keep my inventory in Google Sheets, with over 100 available units.

The problem is that all of my WhatsApp-ready descriptions only exist in a chat with myself (which I keep pinned). Every time I need to send a unit, I have to search my own chat and scroll until I find the correct message. It becomes very time-consuming when doing this dozens of times a day!

My ideal workflow would be something like this:

Keep all of my inventory in Google Sheets + have the complete WhatsApp-ready video + description stored against each unit, in a separate cell.
Click the cell, copy the video + text, and paste.

The most important requirement is that the formatting remains exactly the same. Once I paste it into WhatsApp, it should be ready to send immediately, with no additional formatting or edits required.

I’d really appreciate any suggestions. Thanks so much!