All posts tagged: Excels

Savage House review: A devilish Richard E Grant excels

Savage House review: A devilish Richard E Grant excels

Published by Daniella Wilson

A star rating of 3 out of 5. In the past decade or so, there’s been a notable trend of films and TV shows looking to upend the typically staid conventions of the traditional British costume drama. On the small screen, the likes of Bridgerton and The Great have swapped the polite, chaste norms of the genre for something altogether more steamy, while Yorgos Lanthimos’s award-winning 2018 film The Favourite was about as far removed from the calming Sunday night antics of Downton Abbey as it’s possible to imagine. Savage House – the new 18th century-set black comedy from American writer/director Peter Glanz – fits squarely into this canon, although some of its cinematic influences harken back a little further. In its satire of a rogue-ish upstart looking to climb the aristocratic ladder there are clear echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 epic Barry Lyndon, while there is also something of Peter Greenaway’s eccentric 1982 gem The Draughtsman’s Contract in its debauched, irreverent treatment of the past – although this is a rather more conventional offering …

Excel’s automation features are faster than ChatGPT, but most people never find them in the menus

Excel’s automation features are faster than ChatGPT, but most people never find them in the menus

Published by skeptic

It’s very likely that you’ve tried to clean, sort, or analyze your data using ChatGPT or another artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, assuming that it’s the fastest way to get the job done. However, Excel offers several automation features that can handle a wide range of data tasks with impressive speed. The challenge is that it’s not always obvious which tools to use or where to look for them. Once you understand which feature fits each task and know exactly where to find it, you won’t need to keep opening ChatGPT and similar tools to automate work that Excel can already handle on its own. Related I Let AI Handle Complex Excel Formulas for Me—You Should Too Let AI handle the syntax so you can focus on results. Power Query Import, clean, and reorganize without repeating yourself If you regularly pull data from external files, databases, or web sources and then spend time cleaning it up — splitting columns, fixing data types, and merging tables — Power Query is the feature designed to automate these tasks. …

Excel’s dynamic array functions made me realize I’d been solving problems the hard way for years

Excel’s dynamic array functions made me realize I’d been solving problems the hard way for years

Published by skeptic

Most Excel users I know learned formulas the same way I did — one function at a time, stacked on top of whatever they already knew. Dynamic array functions don’t replace those skills; they just make a lot of the workarounds unnecessary. I’ve been running my self-updating top-five lists with TAKE and DROP for a while, and the same shift has happened with the four functions below. Each one reduced a multi-step routine I used to perform reflexively to a single formula. Related Excel finally fixed its biggest data entry problem, and it’s a lifesaver One click in the Data tab can catch almost all issues. FILTER replaced an entire ritual of helper columns and array formulas One formula now does what multiple functions used to split between them Screenshot by Yasir Mahmood Pulling matching rows in older Excel meant building a nested INDEX, MATCH, SMALL, and IFERROR formula and entering it with Ctrl + Shift + Enter. It worked, but maintaining it later was a problem. The other option was to apply AutoFilter, copy …

Excel’s dynamic array functions made me realize I’d been solving problems the hard way for years

Excel’s LET function is the most underrated thing in the entire program

Published by skeptic

If you’ve spent any time writing formulas in Excel, you’ve likely written that one long formula like a sentence that never ends. These formulas may work, but they’re long, complicated, and if someone other than you needs to replicate them, they’re not going to have a good time understanding what’s going on. However, problems like this shouldn’t exist, especially considering Excel can now write its own formulas. But if you don’t trust Excel, or simply prefer to write your own formulas, the LET function is here to help you out. Related This Excel Trick Lets Me Write Formulas Like a Human Smarter Excel formulas with the simplicity of everyday language. This function changes how Excel formulas work What LET actually does—and why it matters Image taken from Microsoft Excel support page.Credit: Microsoft The LET function is built for one simple function, and if you’ve ever written code before, you can probably guess what it is: it lets you name things inside a formula. You give a value or calculation a name, and then you can use …

Excel’s data validation is far more powerful than just dropdowns — here’s what it can actually enforce

Excel’s data validation is far more powerful than just dropdowns — here’s what it can actually enforce

Published by skeptic

Most people set up a dropdown list to make spreadsheets smarter with Excel’s data validation. However, the Custom option in the Data Validation dialog accepts any formula that returns TRUE or FALSE, which means you can enforce rules that dropdowns were not built to handle. Duplicate prevention, text pattern requirements, date restrictions, and calculated limits all run through one setting that most people skip right past. Here’s how I use custom formulas to lock down my spreadsheets properly. Related Excel’s SEQUENCE function made me realize I’d been wasting time manually filling date columns It replaced my date-filling workflow, and I’m not going back. Custom formulas let you control far more than a list The Custom option accepts any TRUE/FALSE formula as a validation rule Excel’s data validation has several built-in options such as whole numbers, decimals, dates, text length, and, of course, dropdown lists — it’s one of those Excel tricks worth learning early. These cover common scenarios, but they’re rigid. The moment you need a rule that doesn’t fit neatly into one of those …

5 real world examples where Excel’s MAP function shines

5 real world examples where Excel’s MAP function shines

Published by skeptic

If you’re using Microsoft Excel 365, 2021, or 2024, then you have access to dynamic array functions. These functions take productivity to another level thanks to their “spill” functionality. This means a single dynamic array function returns multiple results that spill into adjacent cells, simplifying complex array operations. One that Excel pros use widely is the MAP function. Specifically, I would like to highlight some real-world examples that demonstrate just how powerful the MAP function is. It can be confusing, considering that you have to use it with LAMBDA functions. However, once you see how it actually works in the wild, you’ll realize that the MAP function can save you a ton of time. This is especially true if you deal with a lot of repetitive tasks. Multi-column logic Process multiple arrays in a single formula A common use case of the MAP function is creating multi-column logic. One formula can process multiple arrays at once. This means you no longer need to rely on the traditional fill-down method, where you enter a formula in …