Ceiling

Ever need to round up to the multiple of a specific number?

Example: I need one full time employee for every 7 agents. But I can't hire 1/7th of an FTE. You could use min/max or IF statements, but =CEILING() is faster. Ceiling will round up to the next multiple of 7. So if I have 6 agents, there is 1 FTE, but if there are 8 agents, it is bumped to two.

Check it out here: https://exceljet.net/excel-functions/excel-ceiling-function

INDEX MATCH MATCH

INDEX MATCH MATCH

Say you want to pull a value from a table based on inputs cells. Both the row and column choices are dependent upon those inputs.

Example:

You have a list of food items in column A. Prices for those items are dependent on the month, January-December, and are listed in columns B-M. You want to be able to set up input cells were you could choose to lookup, say, the price of bananas in March. How can you do this?

INDEX MATCH MATCH

= INDEX ( entire matrix , MATCH ( vertical lookup value,  entire left hand lookup column , 0 ) , MATCH ( horizontal lookup value , entire top header row , 0 ) )

Learn more about it here:
http://www.mbaexcel.com/excel/how-to-use-index-match-match/

Not really an Excel tip...

This can be used in any Office program, to add a little zing to whatever you are creating. Have you ever wanted to create a number in a circle? Windings 2  is your answer:

http://speakingppt.com/2011/10/24/cheat-sheet-for-creating-numbers-inside-circles/

BTW, am I the only one who always says WingDings?

Search terms and phrases:
Number in Circle
Windings font

VBA for Various Copy/Paste Functions

I've been playing around with VBA a bit for a model I'm building. I needed a quick reference for various copy/paste functions, and found this website to be very helpful and easy to follow:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/291308

Which is unusual, seeing how it's just the MS website. Still worth a look!

Search terms and phrases:
VBA
Copy Paste Range

Using a Pivot Table to count unique records

Pivot tables have always had a major problem- when you try to count unique records, it will give you the total number of records.

Example: say you have a database of service records, including service provider name and state. If you wanted to determine how many service providers are in a particular state, a pivot table would instead give you the total number of records for that state, even if you had service provider set as a count.

Until now!

Starting with Excel 2013, there's a workaround to get the actual unique value count.

http://datapigtechnologies.com/blog/index.php/distinct-count-in-pivot-tables-finally-in-excel-2013/

Search terms and phrases:
Unique count pivot table Excel
Distinct count pivot table

COUNT and SUM by color!

I'm not going to lie, this trick blew my mind. Have you ever needed to count or sum cells based on the color of the cell? I've always done a filter by color, and then created a new column with some sort of key as to whether to include it in my calculations. Well, someone much smart than I am created a macro that creates a new function: COLORFUNCTION. Enjoy!

http://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/1155-excel-count-sum-cells-by-color.html

Search terms and phrases:
Excel count based on color
Excel sum by cell color

Returning data to the right of a character

Have you ever needed to return data in a text string that was located after a specific character? Here is an easy way to do it without using text to columns (which, depending on your data set, isn't always an option).

http://www.ozgrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60189

Search terms and phrases:
Excel return data to right of character
Separate data based on character Excel