Contextures News 20180522

Excel Skills Test

May 22, 2018

Blank cell trick, Excel skills test, and more, in this week's Excel news. Visit my Excel website for more tips, tutorials and videos, and check the index for past issues of this newsletter.

NOTE: You'll get the next newsletter on June 5th -- we're on the summer schedule now.

Note: For some products mentioned below, I earn a commission on sales. That helps support the free tutorials on my site!

Fill Blank Cells

Some worksheets have blank cells, so it's easier to read headings in a column. I used to work with lots of data like that, which was imported from an accounting system.

It's fine for printing a report, but if you want to sort or filter that data, you'll need to fill in those blanks.

Here are the steps to fill the blank cells manually, and there's a video on my site that shows the steps:

• Select the column that contains the blank cells.
• On the Ribbon's Home tab, click Find & Select, then click Go To Special
• Select Blanks, then click OK
• Type an equal sign, then tap the Up arrow key, to select the cell above
• Press Ctrl+Enter, to enter that formula in all the selected cells.
• Then, select the entire column, and copy it
• Right-click on the selected column, and click the Paste Values command

If you need to do this frequently, there are macros on my website.

Split the Date Solutions

In the previous newsletter, there was a formula challenge, to split a date/time string. Thanks for sending your solutions, and I've added them to the Split Date and Time challenge workbook.

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Excel Articles

Here are a couple of Excel articles that you might find useful or interesting.

Slicers - In a short video, Bill Jelen shows how to get the selections from a Slicer, and list them in a cell, as a worksheet title. You'll need Office 365 for this technique, because it uses the new TEXTJOIN function (Level - Intermediate)

Excel Skills - If you want to test your Excel skills (or someone else's), Sumit Bansal posted a list of 100 Excel Interview questions. The topics range from formatting to macros. (Level - All)

Also see: My Excel Products || Excel Events || Previous Issues || Weekly Humour

Summer Weather

We just celebrated the first long weekend of summer, here in Canada, and the weather wasn't very summery. At least it wasn't as cold as the year that we went camping in the Rockies at the end of May. There was still snow on the ground, and beautiful Lake Louise was frozen solid. On the bright side, the bears were still hibernating!

That's it for this week! If you have any comments or questions, send me an email.

NOTE: For the online version, paste this URL into your web browser: https://www.contextures.com/newsletter/excelnews2018/20180522ctx.html
I'll also post any article updates or corrections there.

Debra Dalgleish
dsdalg @ gmail.com

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