Posted by
Andy Brown
on 06 December 2024
Last month we blogged in detail about the new GROUPBY and PIVOTBY functions in Excel. This month we have 4 lighter new features: focus cells, colour pickers, Draw and Hold and some new templates.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
This blog gives a practical example of using the new Excel PIVOTBY function to create a dynamic pivot table (one where you can choose the row, column and data fields from drop lists).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 05 November 2024
The new PIVOTBY function in Excel allows you to create a pivot table with a dynamic formula. Does this mean that the pivot table is redundant?
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 03 July 2024
You can now add a checkbox to a cell with a single mouse-click. They look good, although it's hard to ensure that only one checkbox in a range is selected.
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 08 May 2024
You can now add Copilot to your 365 licence, although it isn't cheap - this review looks at whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
The Ajelix Excel AI tool claims to help you generate formulae in Excel - so we put it to the test
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
Microsoft would much prefer it if everyone switched to a subscription model for Office licensing, but they aren't abandoning the sale of standalone software applications just yet.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 03 April 2024
How one determined person embedded the published ChatGPT 2 source code and weightings within an Excel workbook to give an insight into how AI works
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 12 October 2023
After 25+ years of using and training in Excel, I have nothing new to learn. Or that's what I thought, until on a recent course a delegate asked me why I was merging cells to make titles ...
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 29 August 2023
If you subscribe to the Excel Beta Preview channel (and are lucky) you can now insert Python code within Excel. The rest of us may have to wait a bit for the official release, but the wait will be worth it, as this blog shows.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 07 June 2023
While browsing through forums (as one does) we found what must surely be the most complicated Excel formula. At 1,860 characters long - and combining some of the most complicated Excel functions - it's a true Excel monster. Unless you can do better?!
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 25 April 2023
When you select part of a formula in Excel, a values preview tooltip now appears showing you what the results would be for this if you calculated it (removing the need for you to press the F9 key).
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 27 February 2023
Learn how to get individual Excel cells to contain sparklines to show trends, how to display column charts or win/loss charts instead, how to play about with grouped charts, how to change sparkline formatting and how to customise sparkline axes.
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 01 February 2023
Microsoft have sneaked in a new short-cut key to invoke the Power Query Editor, but in the course of researching this we also unearthed 4 other key combinations which we suspect even diehard Excel users may not know about.
Posted by
Andy Brown
on 15 September 2022
Did you know that you could combine range names and legacy Excel 4 functions to list out the worksheets or range names in your workbook - wthout using macros? I didn't either - here's how to do this, and much more!