John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged excel · everything

How-To Geek

Someone else's Excel spreadsheet, my problem now—these 5 tools help me handle it

This How-to Geek piece by Tony Phillips walks through five Excel tools for cleaning up a messy inherited spreadsheet: Go To Special to locate blanks, conditional formatting to flag duplicate Order IDs, inconsistent product names and unabbreviated states without altering the data, TEXTSPLIT to break up crammed contact details, and then converting the cleaned range into an Excel table with named constants and helper columns for maintainability. What sets it apart from similar tips is its workflow emphasis: each tool is used to inspect and verify before anything is changed, and the piece closes with basic structural rules for building spreadsheets that others won't need to repair.

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How-To Geek

www.howtogeek.com

7 Handy Microsoft Excel Features You May Have Missed

Excel has seven lesser-known features that can streamline spreadsheet work: Sparklines create compact graphs within single cells, Data Validation restricts entries to specified types and can generate drop-down lists, the Status Bar displays quick calculations like sums and averages without adding formulas, Flash Fill automatically completes patterns (like splitting names into separate columns), Remove Duplicates eliminates repeated rows with one click, Watch Window monitors formula results across large workbooks without hunting through sheets, and Analyze Data provides automatic insights and visualizations. The guide explains how to access and use each feature to save time and reduce errors.

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searchengineland.com

7 useful Excel formulas and functions for PPC

A practitioner-oriented walkthrough of seven Excel techniques for PPC analysts, split into "101" basics (delta calculations, incremental impact, CONCATENATE) and "201" dataset-prep skills (VLOOKUP, converting dates to custom week groupings, text-based categorization with nested IFs, and joining granular multi-attribute datasets). The core argument is that mastering spreadsheet mechanics — not just campaign intuition — is what lets analysts spot high-impact optimizations and build credible performance narratives, since surface-level metric changes can hide larger underlying deltas. Worth keeping as a reference for the actual formulas and step-by-step examples rather than general advice.

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