In Word you can easily count the words simply by clicking “Word Count” from the Review ribbon. But what if you have your text in Excel? There is no built-in word count function in Excel, so we have to find another way.
In a previous post I showed how to count characters in a text string using the LEN function. We will use the same function, with a twist, to do a word count.
In many situations you collect data every day (sales figures, stock prices etc.) for weeks, months and years, while all you want to show in the chart is the last week or two. I’ve seen many people spending a lot of time updating the chart manually every day, so here I will show you how you can make a dynamic chart that always shows the last 7 days. Of course, you can use the same technique for any number of days, weeks or months.
READ MOREIf you want to create a new worksheet in an Excel workbook, you can use the mouse and click next to the rightmost existing sheet. But why not use a shortcut instead?
Alt + Shift + F1
Other Shortcuts:
If you create an Excel report for someone, it is important that you somehow visualise which cells they are allowed to change, and which cells they should not touch. The common way to do this is to use a blue font for the assumptions, i.e. the values that can be changed.
Unfortunately, this is not always enough. Inevitably, someone will try to enter values into the calculation cells as well, and when they do, the whole report might be useless. We need to protect the cells from being tampered with, and the good news is that it takes less than a minute!
Have you ever seen a line chart in Excel that’s suddenly dropping to zero? Here’s why it happens and what to do about it:
Let’s say you have a table where you enter new sales figures every day, and a line chart connected to it. The sales figures for the last few days in the table have not yet been filled out, so the last values for the y-axis are zero. This is what the line chart could look like:
In Excel you often want to copy the cell right above the active cell. Instead of the usual Copy-Paste routine, there is a keyboard shortcut in Excel which will make your life easier:
Ctrl + D
Other Shortcuts: