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Learn how you can use symbols instead of text in your Pivot slicers to create visually effective Excel dashboard reports.

Quickly find out where you can find Excel’s Solver tool and how you can use it to solve for the optimal solution to your problem. It’s sometimes seen as an Advanced Goal Seek.

Goal Seek is part of the What-If Analysis tools, which you’ll find in Excel’s Data tab. It allows you to find the values necessary to achieve a target. Learn all about it in this tutorial.

Learn how to customize the Excel theme and make it the default by saving it the Excel Start folder.

Learn a simple method to deal with gaps in your data, specifically missing dates. You don’t want to display them in a chart, but Excel treats a date axis as continuous and will try to connect the line.

In this tutorial we tackle a complex lookup problem – how to return the header based on criteria in a matrix. I offer my solution using INDEX and SUMPRODUCT. We also cover alternative approaches proposed by the Excel community, including an interesting TEXTJOIN solution that is able to handle multiple match results.

Conditional formatting is great at bringing attention to specific values, whether high/low, deviations, variances. It makes interpreting the data easier. But it can also significantly slow down your workbook. There is a faster alternative. You can use Custom Number Formatting to bring attention to data. Learn how to use it, how to add color-coded up/down errors and percentage deviations.

Conditional formatting is great at bringing attention to specific values, whether high/low, deviations, variances. It makes interpreting the data easier. But it can also significantly slow down your workbook. There is a faster alternative. You can use Custom Number Formatting to bring attention to data. In part 2, learn how to add any symbol to custom number format, how to use up/down arrows for percentage variances, and how custom formatting works with thresholds and icons.

Learn how to perform a matrix lookup, i.e. when you need to return the value based on the header row and the category column, in a scenario where you have more than one header. The powerful INDEX/MATCH combo is capable of handling that a couple of ways.

There is no built-in Gannt chart in Excel, but in this tutorial, you will find two workarounds, one using a scatter plot, and another with stacked bar chart. Error bars come to the rescue in both versions. You’ll get a quick version, and a fully featured one, where you can switch between actual and plan scenarios.

Learn how to add series lines or shaded background to a stacked column chart by combining it with a stacked area chart. It’s a good way of displaying the trend for each category (stack).

In this tutorial, I share the 3 principles, along with some examples, for effective data visualization, that you should apply to your charts and dashboards in Excel. When designing a chart, keep it simple, clear and consistent.