Learn Excel : Tutorial, Tips, Videos and Much More.

In honor of VLOOKUP Week, MVP Bill Jelen has created a VLOOKUP tutorial for those of you who have a basic working knowledge of Excel but want to improve your skills. This tutorial assumes you’ve heard about VLOOKUP and its benefits, but that you don’t really know how to use it. Bill uses the example of updating prices in a product list to introduce the value of this time-saving function.

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VLOOKUP Week has ended. The brainchild of Excel MVP Bill Jelen, the idea inspired all things VLOOKUP, including VLOOKUP odes, haikus, vampires, and a way to track shark attacks. Setting all fun aside–Excel experts created a crazy number of useful and innovative applications of VLOOKUP in seven days. 

Now Bill wants you to vote for your favorite. Top vote-getter will be named the “Great White Shark” of VLOOKUP week!

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Ugh. Excel. It’s not as intuitive as a Word doc, and not as aesthetically pleasing as a PowerPoint presentation. If you’re more creative than analytical, you might feel as though it’s dry and boring and filled with numbers you’d rather not look at. However, I can tell you that after you familiarize yourself with it, it is the best tool Microsoft Office has – and extremely easy to use! 

This guest post is written by Divya Bahl, a blogger for the popular site Her Campus.

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Millions of people using Excel don’t get why they see the “circular reference” error message right after they’ve entered a formula. The message means that your formula is trying to calculate its own cell–kind of like when a dog chases its own tail. Because so many of you (millions) searched on “circular reference” on Office.com, we thought we should very clearly explain how to remove or fix your formula.

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Excel comes with lots of predefined chart types, including column, line, pie, and so on. However, many of you ask how to make other kinds of charts, such as floating column charts, Gantt charts, combination charts, org charts, flow charts, hierarchy charts, histograms, or Pareto charts.

Though these charts aren’t available in the list of predefined chart types, don’t worry. There are ways to create them in Excel.

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We show you how we used an ActiveX list box control and some VBA code to allow our users to enter multiple choices in cells.

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For those of us who crunch words instead of numbers, Excel can be intimidating. We don’t know the difference between a workbook and a worksheet, and for sure don’t know to ask about conditional formatting (a cool way to visually display data). Then one day your boss asks you to create a report–with numbers. Gulp.

In this video, the Office 911 emergency responders show a beginning Excel user how to add a table to a worksheet so she can better organize and view her data.

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It’s still January. There’s still time to share the most popular posts on the Excel blog in 2011. Thanks for reading them! Can’t remember all those Excel keyboard shortcuts? Now you don’t have to! There are a lot of keyword shortcuts in Excel. You can scroll through a long list of them on Office.com, or you can download Quick Reference Cards from our blog and pin them to your corkboard. There are cards for Keyboard shortcuts with theCtrl keys , Keyboard shortcuts with Function keys , and Miscellaneous…(read more)
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15 Spreadsheet Formatting Tips

For the last couple years I’ve been meaning to pull together some of the tips that I’ve learned working on the Excel team about how to make nice looking spreadsheets. Well, last week, Rob Collie (a previous Excel Program Manager, and now CTO at Pivotstream and author of PowerPivotPro.com) beat me to it with his post “In the Browser, Aesthetics Yield a Greater Return.”

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You’ve finished your business plan and polished the pitch for investors. As an entrepreneur you know what comes next: number-crunching. To clinch funding, you need a financial projection that shows investors the path to profitability. We worked with @Guy Kawasaki to guide you through creating a financial forecast that will wow funders.

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