IT APPLICATION TOOLS IN BUSINESS

CHAPTER 5

ADVANCE EXCEL- USING THE IF FUNCTION IN EXCEL TO PROGRAM YOUR SPREADSHEETS

In this short video tutorial, we're going to take a look at the basics of the if function in Microsoft Excel. And for me, this is
a really exciting topic I love using the if function. And the reason it's exciting for me is because the if function allows us as
Excel users to basically put in some programming into our Excel spreadsheets. Now, it's not exactly programming, but it is
quite similar to some simple programming. So let's jump right in to looking at the basics of the if function in Excel. Now,
what I have here is a simple spreadsheet that lists the results of the national Spanish exam for my students. Now, obviously,
these aren't really my students names, these are not really their scores. I'm aware of student privacy laws, and I would not
put my real students names and scores in a YouTube video. But let's say that these were my real students, I would like to
be able to see not just the raw score that each student got. But I would also like to know whether they passed or failed just
by looking here at this column. And there's a couple of different ways that we could do this. But the if function in Excel is
one of my favorites. So let's look at how to do that, what I can do is just click on this cell, let's say cell d3. This is where I
would like it to report whether Tom passed or failed with a score of 94. Once I'm on the cell, I can just type equals to begin
writing a formula, then I type F. And the reason I said that this is kind of like programming an Excel spreadsheet is because
it reminds me of my days of learning basic, I don't know if anyone else learned to program in basic as a young person in
school, but I did. And I remember the if then statements, if then statements are a very important part of programming. So if
this is true, then do this. That's what we're going to create here. And if then statement, so equals f, then I put in a left
parenthesis. And as soon as I do that, look, Excel gives me some tips and some hints to help me to successfully complete
this formula. This is a feature in modern versions of Excel, where it kind of coaches you and helps you. And it's really nice
to have that reminder, so equals if left parenthesis, and then I'm going to click on cell C three, because this is what I want
to test I want to test if Tom score was greater than a certain amount, so I'll click on Tom score. But notice, instead of putting
94 Here, it just puts the cell C three. And that's exactly what I want. So equals if left parenthesis, C three is greater than, and
I just typed greater than in there. And then I put in the cutoff point for pass or fail, let's say for this test. 69% means fail.
70% means passed, let's just say in this case, that's true. Now I have to put the then portion of this formula in. Now if I type,
then it's not going to work when you're writing a formula using the if function then is denoted by the first comma. So the
first comma that you type in the formula represents then So here again, I'm repeating myself a lot, but let's go through this.
If c three is greater than 69, then that's what I have written here, I want to print the word pass. And by print I don't mean
printed out on a printer, I just mean print it on the screen. And so to do that, to say that you want to print, you put in quotation
marks. So there's the first quote, and I did put a space there. So I put space left quotation mark, and then I'll type the word
pass, and then quotation mark. Now my second comma represents if not, or if false is how they say it here. So if c three is
greater than 69, then print pass. If not, then print fail. Now I need to put my close quote there. And then I'm supposed to put
the right parenthesis right there. But if you forget to do that, it's fine. It'll work anyway. But you cannot forget this close
quote. Okay, let's see if it worked. I'm going to hit Enter on the keyboard or return. And it worked my formula with the if
function worked, it can tell that Tom passed. Now here we go, I need to type that all over again, for Susan, for Alyssa, for
Shauna for Kevin, this is going to take all night. No, actually, I don't have to do that. If you've watched my other tutorials,
you know that I can use the autofill handle to save me a lot of time. So I'm going to click here on pass, and then I'm going
to go to the lower right corner. And if I put my mouse just exactly on that little green square, then the mouse pointer changes
to a black plus sign, and that means I'm about to use the autofill handle, which in this case will copy whatever is in this cell.
Okay, so here we go. Now, you're probably thinking it's just going to copy the word pass all the way down. But no, that's
not how it works. It's going to copy whatever's in the cell and the word past is not really in the cell. Look, you can see up
here what's actually in the cell. That's what's going to get copied the formula. So I'm going to click and drag and release
And look, it tells me exactly who passed and who failed based on the criteria that I put into the IF formula. Okay, so there
you have the basics of using the if function in Excel, there's a lot more that you can do with it. But this will help you get
started. I hope, I hope that you'll continue on and watch my other Excel videos have several video tutorials about Microsoft
Excel that I think you'll enjoy. And if you did enjoy this, please click the Like button below this video. And please consider
connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my
YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students. And watch for another video from me at least
every Monday.

USING COUNT AND COUNT A IN EXCEL

In this Excel tutorial, we're going to look at a couple of functions that I hope that you'll find to be useful. And they are count
and count a. In addition, we will also talk a little bit about the status bar and how you might use it. So you can see here that
I have a spreadsheet that's pretty big. There are many different records here, hundreds and hundreds of records. And
remember that that's what we call each of these rows. Basically a row that is filled in with data is a record. This spreadsheet
has hundreds of records. And what if I would like to know exactly how many there are? Well, of course, I could just scroll
down quite a ways and look at the data and just keep going down until I find a blank row. But after a while that gets harder
and harder to do and less effective. So let's learn how to set up a formula using the function count or count a to help you to
count the number of records that you have. And to do this, I'm going to browse over to the right and find an empty cell. And
here's an empty cell. That's the one I'm going to use. Now, of course, you could do this in any number of other places. This
is just the example that I'm showing. So here in this cell, I'd like it to tell me how many total records are in this Excel
spreadsheet. First thing I need to do after selecting the cell is tap an equal sign. If you've watched my previous Excel
tutorials, you know that when using formulas in Excel, you can think of it kind of like an algebra equation. And so I'm going
to say this cell equals So I tap the equal sign. And then I'm going to type in the word count, left parenthesis. And then what
do I want it to count. Let's say I want it to count the total number of records that have units sold, I'll just click on column E,
it highlights the entire column. And you can see here at the right that it's put E through E, which in effect means the entire
column. And then at this point, I should put in the close parenthesis, but you don't really have to do that. So I'll just tap Enter
on the keyboard. And it tells me that I have 700 records in this spreadsheet that have a number of units sold. Now, of course,
I could go up here and I could just type in something like total records with sales. So I could label that column and what it
means. Now what if instead of having it count the total number of records with units sold, what if I would have said count,
left parenthesis and had it just count the first column here, right? Every one of these records, I would assume has something
in the first column. So if I would have selected column A and tapped enter, take a look at the number that it returns it returns
a zero. So why is that? Why did it return 700 When I counted units sold, but it returned zero when I counted segment. The
reason why is because the count function that I'm using here that only counts cells in that range that have a number in them.
And so because my column A does not have any numbers, it's just words, it's government, midmarket channel partners,
these are words only no numbers. So because of that they aren't counted, and it returns a number of zero. So let's see how
you can fix that if you want to count the total number of records, but you want it to include text, this is what you would
have to do this cell equals count and then add the letter A. And to be honest, I'm not sure what that a signifies. Maybe it just
means letters, not just numbers, but letters, or maybe it signifies all count all. But anyway, count a left parenthesis. And
now if I select column A, the entire column, tap Enter on the keyboard. Look at the number of returns it returns for me 701.
Now let's browse down the page a little bit and take a look at why it said 701. You can see because I chose count a instead
of just count. It included this first cell cell a one in the tally. And so that's how it came up with 701 When I simply used
count with column E If you remember, it counted all of the cells that had numbers only, and so unit sold was not included
in that tally. Therefore, the end result was just 700. So I hope that you can see some ways that count and count a could be
useful to you. Before we end though, I want to also point out that there is a much faster way to get similar information,
although sometimes you will just want to use count a and count. So it's important to know those. But let's say just at the
spur of the moment, you need to know how many records are here in column H, all you have to do without setting up a
formula at all, is just click on the column H. And look what it does down here on what we call the status bar, we have some
automatic information that's brought to us by Excel. And one of those bits of information is the count. So it tells me right
there, there's a count of 701 records in column H, it also gives me the sum of all of the numbers that are in column H. And
so that's a huge sum that I have there. And it gives me the average of the numbers in column H, that's with zero work on my
part. There's no formula, there's no functions used, I simply just click on the column letter J, K, and it gives me that
information. Now what if I pick a column that has only words, like Column A or B, then it can't give me as much data but
it does give me account still, just so you know, you can customize the information that it does give you, you can right click
on the status bar, and it gives you the opportunity to make some changes to the information that's brought to you. I'm going
to click here on sale price. To illustrate that a little bit better. I can now right click, and I could add minimum and maximum.
And so now I can look at this and see, the cheapest thing that's for sale in the spreadsheet sells for $7. And the most expensive
sells for $350. So in some cases, this status bar will give you all the information you need and you won't need to create an
account or count a formula. In other cases you will need to I hope that you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please
click the Like button below. And consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and
Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students
and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you'd like to support my YouTube channel, please consider
becoming a patron of mine through my Patreon account, and you'll find information about that in the description below.

THE EXCEL SUMIFS FUNCTION

In this video, I'm going to show you how to use the sum ifs Excel function, this function is just a fantastic function very
useful, very helpful. You can see I have a simple spreadsheet here that serves as a movie inventory for my DVD and blue
ray collection. And let's say I would like to figure out how much money I've spent over the years on DVDs on blue rays, or
maybe on different genres of movies. So this calls for a SUM function. And I could do a typical SUM function here or use
AutoSum. But that would give me the total of everything. So what if I just want a list of all the blue rays and the total cost
for them? Well, I could filter the data, I could deselect DVDs and just show blue rays and things like that, and then do a
SUM function just of the blue rays. But that can get time consuming. And what if there's not just two options? What if
there's five or six, like in the case of genres, so what we can do is use a sum ifs function. Let me demonstrate here in AI
three, I'm just going to type in cost of blue rays, and then I'll tap enter a couple of times and type in cost of DVDs. Okay, so
right here, I would like the total cost of my blue ray collection to appear, I would start by typing equals and then use my
function, sum ifs, left parenthesis, and Excel shows us what it's looking for. It wants the sum range. So what is it that we
want it to add up? Well, we want it to add up the cost paid. So I'll click and drag to get the whole sum range. Now if I only
have 20, or 30 rows or records to select, that's a good way to do it. But what if I had 1000 records and I wanted Excel to
examine all of them to see what to add up clicking and dragging is not going to be a great option. So instead, what you do
is you click on the top most records that you care about, hold CTRL SHIFT and tap the down arrow on the keyboard that
will automatically highlight the information from the point that you selected all the way down. Okay, so I've got the sum
range, now put in a comma, and now I need to find the criteria range. So I want the criteria range to be this format column.
So I'll click here on Blu ray Ctrl Shift down so it looks through all of those search For what? Well, that's what I put in next
comma, what am I searching for? What is the criteria? Well, it's blue rays. So I could either type out blue ray, in quotes, or
I could simply click here on B to to show Excel, what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the word blue ray, let's just leave it
in quotes, I'll put in the right parenthesis, and then tap Enter on the keyboard, and you see what it did. Excel searched column
B, looking for the word blue ray. And when it found it, it added the cost paid or the amount paid for that blue ray to all of
the other costs of blue rays from this entire sheet. This is a very powerful time saving function that we have here. Let's do
the same thing now. But with DVDs, I'll type equals sum ifs, left parenthesis, the sum range, what do I want it to add up, I
want it to add up at least some of these numbers. Now I can go back up here to continue my formula. Or sometimes it's
easier just to go up here to the formula bar, comma, what's my criteria range, that's here, I select the top most record that I
want it to search Ctrl, shift down, it selects everything. And then up here in the formula bar, comma, what do I want it to
find? Well, in this case, I wanted to find DVDs. Now this time, instead of putting the word DVD inside of quotation marks,
I just want to click on it, just to show you that that is another option. So I can click there, put in the right parenthesis, tap,
enter 71. Now I could format this to look like dollars. And there we have it, it's summing up the cost paid if the format is
blue ray, or in this case, DVD. Now because this second example is based on this cell B five, watch what happens if I type
in blue ray there, it updates the amount, because it's not based on something in quotes. This one is based on whatever is in
B five, I'll change that back to DVD. And it changes the results again, now there is a reason it's called the sum ifs and not
just sum if and that's because you can do more than one sum if at a time. So let's look at how to do that. What if I want to
know the total amount spent? Not just on DVDs, but specifically mystery DVDs? How would I do that? Well, equals sum
ifs, left parenthesis, I want to add up the cost paid Ctrl Shift down, I'll go up here to the formula bar, comma, the criteria
range, it's right here, I want it to search b two, all the way through the bottom. So Ctrl, Shift down, and then I put a comma
in the formula bar, I'm searching for DVDs, I'll just click here on this B seven in this case where the word DVD is, and then
I put a comma in so that's my first F. But look, because I put a comma, Excel is now expecting another criteria range Criteria
range two, in addition to DVD, I'm looking for mysteries. So I'll go up here, click on F two, in this case, Control Shift Down
to get the whole column and then back up in the formula bar, comma, and what is the actual criteria? What is it that we're
looking for, we're looking for mysteries. So as you can see, this gets fairly complicated if you have more than one criteria
in your some ifs formula. So this is all lit up in different colors. But let's see if it worked. I'll put a close parenthesis, tap,
Enter. And I've only spent $24 on mystery DVDs in my collection. And you can see that that's true just by browsing down
$15 Mystery DVD, plus a $9 mystery DVD. So this is just one example of how to use some ifs there are lots of very powerful
uses of some ifs. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful if you did, please like follow and subscribe and when you do
click the bell so you'll be notified when I post another video.

THE EXCEL AVERAGE IFS FUNCTION

In this video, I will show you how to use Excels average ifs function. And the sample spreadsheet I have for this which you
can find in the description below has a list of fictional student names, grade levels, test scores, and I've already calculated
the quartile scores, top scores, bottom scores, etc. But what I'd really like to know at this point is what's the average score
for ninth graders on this test? What's the average score for 10th graders 11th graders, 12th graders? And there are various
ways that I could do this, I could filter out the data that I don't need, and then I could create an average formula, but there's
a lot of steps there. Instead, I'm going to just use the Excel average ifs function. To do this, I'll just click here in cell j 14
type equals average ifs, left parenthesis. And the idea behind average ifs is that we only want to average something if it
meets certain criteria. And you can see here Excel is giving me hints about what it's looking for. So at this point, it wants
the average range. So what is it that will be averaged well the score, that's what I'm looking for the average score. So here I
have the range that has the scores, and I could click and drag to highlight that range. And that works perfectly in this case.
But what if your spreadsheet has 1000 records or 10,000 records, clicking and dragging is not going to be practical. So
instead, what you can do is click on the top most cell, hold Ctrl and Shift and then tap the down arrow on the keyboard that
will select the range from the cell that you're in, all the way down. Okay, now we put a comma, and Excel is now looking
for criteria range number one. So what is the criteria that's going to tell Excel that it should average a test score? Well, the
criteria is the grade level. So I need to select the grade levels, I'll click on the first student's grade level, hold Ctrl, Shift, tap
down to select all of the grade levels. And then I'll put in a comma. And a lot of times when doing a complicated formula
like this, it's better to go up to the formula bar and use that to enter the information. So I'll put in my comma. And now Excel
is looking for criteria one. So we've already told it what the criteria range is, it's going to look in this range. But look for
what what's the actual criteria itself? Well, it's the number nine. Now I could type the number nine here as my first criteria.
But sometimes it makes more sense. Instead of typing the number in, why don't I just click the cell i 14 In this case, because
that's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for number nine, and number nine is right here. So I'll click on that to select it at this
point, right parenthesis is all we need. Tap enter, and the average test score for ninth graders is 86. So we can eyeball that
to see if it's right, ninth grader 79/9 Grader 93, the average of that, yeah, would be about 86. It looks like it worked. It did it
correctly. So now I need to do the same thing for 10th grade, right, I need to go through and type average ifs and do the
whole thing again, except for 10th grade. Well, actually, no, I don't have to do that. Instead, I'll click on 86. But keep in
mind, it's not really 86. If you look up here in the formula bar, it doesn't have the number 86. It has the formula that I used
to produce the number 86. And then I'll go here to the lower right corner of the cell, there's a green square, that's the autofill
handle, or fill handle it sometimes called and I'll click and hold the mouse click and drag down, and it will automatically
copy that same formula down but adjust the criteria one, so I can test that out by clicking here. And then looking up at the
formula bar. The criteria one there is I 15. What about here? It's i 16. And what about here, it's i 17. So what a great way to
quickly search a range, and then pull out the exact information that I want averaged based on a criteria. Now there's a reason
it's called average ifs with an S at the end. And that's because you can actually do more than one criteria in the formula. So
for example, if I were to add another column, just by right clicking on E, and selecting Insert, let's say column E is where I
list the feeder school, the middle school or junior high where the student came from. And I'll just quickly specify which
school each student came from. So now let's see if I can get the results of the average score for 12th graders from random
school. So 12th graders from random, I'll click here, and I'll type equals average ifs, left parenthesis, and this formula is
going to get pretty complicated. So I'm going to move up to the formula bar to finish this formula. I'll click Excel is looking
for the average range. So what is it that I want to average? Well, it's this. So I click there, hold Ctrl, Shift Down Arrow, it
selects all of the data. In my formula bar, I put a comma. What's the criteria range? Well, there's two criteria, right? We're
looking for 12th graders from random school. Let's start with 12th graders. So criteria range number one, I'll click here on
the first student's grade, hold Ctrl, Shift Down Arrow to select all of the data, put in my comma. Now Excel is looking for
criteria number one, which is the number 12. Now I could either click here on 12, or I could type it into the formula. I'll just
type it in. Now I put my comma. Now, what's my second criteria, it's not just the grade level of 12, but they have to come
from random school. So criteria range number two is the schools. So I click on the first school Ctrl, Shift Down Arrow,
back up in my formula bar, I'll put in a comma. Now Excel wants the actual criteria to that it's going to look for it's going
to look in this range for criteria two, which is the words random school, it's looking for those words. Now in this case, I can
either click on cell E two, and whatever is in cell E two, that's the criteria that Excel is going to look for To decide what
scores to average. So that will work. Let me prove to you that it works, I'll put in my right parenthesis, tap, enter, and the
average score of 12th graders from random school is 81. And you can see that that's different from the average of all 12th
graders. Now let's look at the alternate way to do that. Instead of clicking on E two, I could have typed in the words random
school. However, watch what happens when I tap Enter, it didn't work, I get an error message. Why? Well, the reason why
is because the data in column E isn't numbers, it's text. And so I need to put random school in quotation marks. So now if I
tap Enter on the keyboard, look, it gives me the same results eighty- one. So these are just a couple of examples of how to
use the average ifs function in Microsoft Excel, there's a lot more that you can do with it. I hope you enjoyed this video. If
you did, please like follow and subscribe. And when you do subscribe, click the bell, so you'll be notified when I post
another video. If you'd like to support my channel, you can do so through my Patreon account, and you'll find a link to that
in the description below.

USING LEFT RIGHT AND MID FUNCTIONS IN EXCEL

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use the mid left and write functions in Microsoft Excel. These are sometimes called
the string functions. And what they're often used for is to extract bits of information from existing text or numbers. So you
can see here in the spreadsheet, I have a contacts list, lots of names and dates of when these names were added to the list.
We have addresses, phone numbers, etc. So it's a contact sheet. But for this example, I would like to extract the area codes
from the phone numbers and have them in a separate column. And I'd like to extract some other information as well. And
I'm going to do it by using the left, right and mid functions. So let's first look at area code. Here we have a column full of
phone numbers. And I would like to extract just the area codes. To do that, all I have to do is click on cell E two in this case
and type equals, so this cell equals and then I'll use the left function, I type in the left parenthesis, and you can see the
parameters that Excel is looking for here. It wants some text to examine. And then it wants to know the number of characters
to produce. So the text to examine is this phone number here. So I'll just click there on D two, of course, I could have just
typed it in as well. And then I'll put a comma, and then the number of characters to produce. Now if you look at the phone
number and the area code in order to get the area code counting from the left, how many characters do I want to capture?
Well, the left parenthesis counts as one. So that's 1234, and five, so I want five characters to be produced. And then I should
put in the right parenthesis, tap Enter on the keyboard, and look what it did. It examined this data, this phone number here
and pulled out the first five characters in that cell. So now I get to do that again, right for colon. Well, actually, no, I don't
have to do that. Again, I can just click on the cell where the formula has been entered, and then double click on the autofill
handle that's in the lower right corner, you can also click and drag, but double clicking generally is the fastest best way to
use the autofill handle. So you can look up and down the sheet and see that I have now successfully extracted the area code
from these phone numbers and put them in this column here, Column E. And so really, that's all there is to the left function,
it allows you to basically copy characters counting from the left. Let's try another example. This time we'll use the right
function. So here in the addresses, I would like a list of just the zip codes. That way I could easily use the sort options in
Excel to sort based on zip code, I could know who's in which state and they would all be grouped together. So this could be
really useful. I'll just type in equals, and this time, I'm going to use the right function. Now it's probably obvious why I'm
using the right function rather than the left. Because the zip code is here at the right, it just makes sense to use the right
function and to count from the right to the left. Okay, so resuming my formula, it's equals right, left parenthesis. Again,
Excel is looking for text to examine and the number of characters to produce. So I want it to examine the text in C two, I
put in a comma, and zip codes have five characters or digits, so I'll just put five and then right parenthesis, tap Enter on the
keyboard, and I've successfully extracted just the zip code out of this full address. I can click on f2 Double click on the
autofill handle, and it will automatically identify and pull out the zip codes from column C. Let's look now at one more
function in this category. And that is the MID function. And this is the hardest of the three, but it's still very doable. So here
in column G, I would like to produce a list of the months when these people were added to the list. And you can see that the
months are in the middle of this data, they're not at the left, they're not at the right, they're somewhere in the middle. So this
is a little bit harder case, I can't use the left function, because that would include the word Wednesday or Sunday, and I can't
use the right function, because that would include the year and in order to get to the month, I would probably have to include
the date as well. So instead, we're going to use mid, so this cell equals mid left parenthesis. Now look at the parameters that
Excel needs me to provide. It wants to know what text to examine, well, that's going to be easy, it's going to be b two. And
I'll go ahead now and click on that, and then the start number, and then the number of characters to produce. So this cell is
equal to mid left parenthesis, V two, comma, now the start number. So what is the number of the character that I want to
begin counting from, so I want to begin counting at the j. So let's count through the W is one, then we have two, three, the
comma is four, the space is five. So if I want to start with J, the start number would be six. So I'll type in six, and then
another comma. Now the number of characters how many characters do I want it to produce and print on the screen? Well,
three, I want it to say J un for June. So I'll just type the number three, right parenthesis, and then tap Enter on the keyboard.
And it worked. I've successfully extracted information from the middle of this cell using mid and produce them and printed
them on the screen here in column G. And then I can just click on the cell and then double click the autofill handle. And
there we go. we've extracted the month from the middle of this data. If I wanted to, I could easily then grab the year by
using the right function, I'll just click here on b two, comma, and counting from the right if I want the year, I would need
four characters, tap Enter on the keyboard, and then click on the cell double click the autofill handle. So now I can easily
identify the month and year that each of these people were added to the list. So I hope that you can see the power of using
left right and mid functions in Excel, they really can be very useful. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to
be helpful. If you did, please like follow and subscribe. And when you do subscribe, click the bell next to the subscribe
button. That way you'll be notified whenever I post another video. If you'd like to support my channel, become a supporter
of mine through my Patreon account, and you'll see a link to that in the description below.

ADVANCED EXCEL- VLOOKUP BASICS

In this advanced Excel tutorial, I'm going to show you the basics of using the VLOOKUP function. And VLOOKUP can
really be quite a powerful tool for you in Excel, you can do several different things that can be useful. But in this tutorial,
like I said, we're going to look just at the basics of how to use it. And in this tutorial, I'm using one of the spreadsheets that
I made in past tutorials, if you haven't seen my Excel Basics tutorial, my intermediate Excel tutorial, and also the series of
advanced Excel tutorials, you really should go back and watch those. But in those tutorials, I created the spreadsheet, that's
a movie inventory of movies that I have. And it's quite a short list. But for the sake of this tutorial, let's imagine that there
are 1000, or 2000, or 5000 records here in this spreadsheet, instead of just 20 or 30. Movies, let's pretend that there's 2000
movies. And I'm also going to have you pretend that instead of just six or seven columns of data, imagine that there's 20
different columns, you know, one of the columns lists the duration of the movies, another one lists the star of the movie,
imagine just a pretty big spreadsheet with lots of columns and lots of records, lots of rows, one of the challenges that we
have, when you get a huge spreadsheet like that is how do I pull out the data that I want to see and that I want to think about
from a spreadsheet, and I'm going to show you how to use VLOOKUP to do that. So one of the best ways to think about
VLOOKUP is to think of it as being similar to looking in the index of a book to find out what is in the book, or looking
through a catalog to look up something that you might want to buy. And you can find the part number and you can find the
cost and things like that. Another comparison would be that it's similar to looking up someone in a phonebook, you look up
their name, and you find their address or their phone number. So in this spreadsheet, again, imagining that it's much bigger
than it actually is, let's say that because it's so big, I find it hard to know what the rating is of a particular movie. And I
would like to be able to type in the name of a movie and find out exactly what the rating is for that movie. To do that, I'm
going to need two cells. And so I'm going to use these two cells here. And I'm going to go to this cell. And I'll type in equals
VLOOKUP. And notice as soon as I do that, I get a pop up that is going to hopefully help me to do this formula correctly.
Now I'll put in the left parenthesis, and it gives me some more details. It says that I need to now put in a lookup value, a
table array, a column, index number and a range lookup. And each of those notice is separated from the rest with a comma.
So lookup value, comma, table array, comma, column, index number, comma, range lookup. Now the official name for
each of these four different sections of this formula is argument. Each of these is an argument. So this is argument number
123, and four. So let's look at argument one. First, it's asking for the lookup value. So basically, what is it that I know what
is it that I'm going to look up information about, but it's something that I already know. So again, think of going to a library,
you know the name of the book that you want, let's say it's the book A Wrinkle in Time, which is an awesome book written
for young adults, but I think it's great for anyone, and I hear Disney is soon to make it into a movie. But anyway, let's see at
the library, you would like to look up where to find that book, what you know is the name of the book. In that case, it's A
Wrinkle in Time. So that's the lookup value. Now in this case, I would like the lookup value to be changeable, I would like
to be able to type in, let's say The Princess Bride and have it tell me PG or the Martian and have it tell me PG 13. And so
because I want it to be changeable, I'm just going to click on cell H eight, I'll click there. So basically, whatever I type in
cell H eight, that will become the lookup value. All right, I'll put a comma in there. Next, it wants the table array. And if
you've watched my Excel Basics tutorial, you know the term range. And that's basically what this table array is. It's a range
of your spreadsheet that you want Excel to look at. And to be careful, I really want to include all of the columns that I have
here. Now, you may not want to when you do this yourself, but I want to go in and choose a three through F 22. So that'll
be all of the actual data from my spreadsheet, it's not going to include some of this other stuff that I put in later. So to put
that range in to the formula, all I have to do is click on it and drag to select that range that I want it to look through. Now
that's really easy when it's such a small spreadsheet, but imagine a giant spreadsheet like I asked you to pretend that this is
in that case, it wouldn't be practical to click and drag. So that's okay. You could just go in and type a three through and that's
indicated by a colon F 22 Okay, great. So I've done the first argument and the second argument. Now on to the third
argument. The third argument is it wants to know a column index number. So what this is asking for, it's asking for you to
pick one of the columns. Now, it's not looking for column A, Column B, Column C, no, in this case, it's not what it's looking
for is whatever the table array is that you selected, whatever that first column in the array is, that's number one, then number
two, number three, number four, number five, number six. Now what if I hadn't included column A, in the table array that
I selected? What if I had started here in B three, instead of a three, well, then this would be column one, this would be
column two. So it doesn't have to correlate to the ABCDE F, it can just be whatever it is that you selected for the Table
Array, or you clicked and drag to highlight the far left column is column one, then column two, then column three, then
column four, then column five. So now I'm going to do that argument. I'll put in a comma to separate the second argument
and the third argument. And how do I know which column to select? Well, the column I select is the column that has the
information that I want to draw out. So if you remember my example, I want to be able to type in the name of a movie and
find out what its rating is. So that means I want column C, but remember, I've got to put it as a number. So I go to the array,
the table array that I highlight it, and I say, Okay, this is the first column, this is the second. So I want the third column. So
I type in three comma. Next, it wants a range lookup. And this is kind of tricky and a little confusing for me as well as for
many people. Basically, what this is asking is, is there a requirement that h eight be an exact match to what's in the
spreadsheet? And this is mostly useful, I think, with numbers. So for example, let's say instead of typing in names of movies,
what if we typed in the date that the movie was purchased? If I were to type in 2007, it would produce a PG. But what if I
typed in 2006. And what if there is no 2006 entry here? Well, if I in this fourth argument in the range lookup, if I have it set
to be true, then it will look for an approximate match, it'll find basically, whatever is the closest, if I type in the word false,
then it's going to require an exact match. If you don't type in the exact match, it's not going to produce the result that you're
looking for. In this case, I'm going to leave it as false. So I'm going to require the exact match. And then you're supposed to
put in the right parenthesis, but you don't really have to. So I'll just type Enter. And look, it's giving me a message saying
the value is not available. So this is an error. Now the reason that's showing me an error code is because there is nothing
typed in this cell here. So let's test it out. I'm going to type in I Am Legend, let's see what happens. Look, it says PG 13. So
that seemed to work pretty well. Let's try it again, I'll type in Groundhog Day. So I type in Groundhog Day, hit enter, and
it's PG. Now once you have done this, if you've set up a VLOOKUP like this, if you regret how you've laid it out on the
screen, like I do a little bit, let's see what we can do to make it so that you type the word here and it tells you on the right
whether it's PG, I think that would look a little better. So to do that, I'm just going to double click here. And I can see up
here in the formula bar, that's the formula. I'll just copy that, and then I'll paste it here. And notice that it gives me an error
again. So I need to double click on it and look at my formula and see where it messed up. Because I copied it from one
column to the next look, it shifted everything to the right a little and also down because I moved down one. So I can repair
this formula just by clicking on the first argument clicking and dragging to highlight it. You can also do this up here in the
formula bar, and then I'll click on h eight. Next, we go on to the second argument, which is the table array, the table array
was changed quite a bit, I'm just going to click and drag. But remember, with a larger spreadsheet, you would need to just
type in the cell names, that would be much faster. And the column index number is still valid three and the range lookup
faults. So now I can hit Return or Enter on the keyboard. And I can actually delete the one that's above. So now I have a
space to type in the movie name, and it tells me the rating off to the right. Okay, let's do another example. Just to test it out,
I'll type in the giver, and it changes to PG 13. So I hope that you found this tutorial to be helpful. This is just the beginning
of what VLOOKUP can do for you. But to be honest, this is how I use it most often just as a way to create kind of like a
form that I just fill out. I type in the name of something or the part number of something. And then it tells me other data. So
like I said at the beginning, it's kind of like looking up a book at the library and finding information about the book or
looking up somebody's name in the phonebook and getting their address or getting their phone number or the city that they
live in. Now if I wanted to of course I could highlight these and I could change them to be bold and centered and things like
that and kind of create a nice little space here that it's a tool basically, that I can click and type in to get the information that
I'm looking for. Now there are a couple of rules, you need to know if you're going to use VLOOKUP. Probably the first rule
is that you need to have your data in vertical columns. So I have column titles here. And the lists of items go vertically, right
information about those items in the list go horizontally, but the actual different records go vertically in columns, it has to
be that way. And the reason why is because V lookup, the V and V lookup means vertical. So if you have your spreadsheet
set up the other way, it wouldn't work. There is such thing as h lookup for horizontal. But anyway, that's rule number one
that you need to have your data arranged vertically in the spreadsheet in columns. The second rule is that the information
that you know that you're going to be typing in the box basically has to be to the left of the data that you want to find. So
the data that I know in this case is the names of the movies, right, that's what I'm going to be able to remember and produce
and type in this box. So that in my spreadsheet that needs to be to the left of the information, I want to look up and find in
this case, the rating. If your spreadsheet is not set up that way, you need to move the column that has the information that
you're going to be able to type in the box, you want to move that to the left, because that is a requirement. So if you keep
those two rules in mind, you should be able to start using VLOOKUP successfully. So I hope that you found this video to
be helpful. If you did, I'd appreciate it. If you'd please click the Like button below this video. And please consider connecting
with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And please do make sure you subscribe to my
YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for another video from me at least
every Monday.

HOW TO EXTRACT DATA FROM A SPREADSHEET USING VLOOKUP, MATCH AND INDEX
Hi, welcome to tuts plus my name is Bob Flusser. When you have a lot of data on a worksheet, and you want to extract
some of that data to use on other worksheets, the vlookup natch and index functions are great ways to do it. These functions
work in any version of Excel on Windows or Mac. And they also work on the web in Google Sheets. And also in the web
versions of Excel with the VLOOKUP function, and the V stands for vertical, you have data arranged down columns. And
by the way, there is also an H lookup function, where you have data arranged across rows, H is horizontal, and it works the
exact same way as VLOOKUP. So there's really no need for me to cover that in this tutorial, you can grab actual data from
a worksheet like you see here and use it in other sheets, whereas the match and index functions are really concerned with
the positioning of data, where your data are located, rather than what is the actual value of the data. If you want to follow
along in this tutorial, using your own workbook, go right ahead. If you'd like to use the sheet that I have here on screen, you
can see it's called VLOOKUP example, you could download this from the Tut's plus website, right here on the page where
you're watching this tutorial. And before we actually start clicking around and writing formulas, I want to give you a little
bit of info on how VLOOKUP works VLOOKUP links to different tables, and they could be on the same worksheet, or
more likely on different worksheets even in different workbooks using a unique identifier. And the unique identifier that
we're going to use in this tutorial is going to be an order number. But in other situations, it could be other things you can
think of it sort of like as a serial number. If you work with databases, you might be familiar with the concept of a primary
key. So with this table in mind, let me explain how the syntax works. Like any function, we start off with an equal sign, and
then you have the name of the function V lookup, and open a parenthesis, there are three required arguments and one
optional argument. The first argument is what's called the lookup value. And that's that unique identifier that we were talking
about. And in our example, that's going to be the order number. Now, because you have to have commas separating the
arguments in any function, after you put in the lookup value, you type in a comma. And then the second argument is the
table range. And in our example, that's going to be the entire table. But keep in mind, it doesn't always have to be that, then
we put in a comma. And the third argument is the column number. Now let's say we want to get the sale amount. And you
can see here, that's the last column in this table. In this instance, that's column number eight. Now, don't get that confused
with the fact that you can see here, it's column H, there's no law that says that the table has to start in column A. So let's say
for example, if we start the table in column B, then the sale column is still going to be the eighth column, but it's going to
be in column II instead of column H. So that's why we're referring to the actual column number of the data table, not the
column of the worksheet. Anyway, after you put in the column number, you put in a comma, and then that optional argument
at the end is true or false. And this could be a little confusing. In this instance, we're going to say false. And what that means
is this false means don't give me an approximation give me an exact amount. True means and approximation is okay. Now
there are times when an approximation is alright. But when we're looking at order numbers, and when we want to plug in
an order number and find the sale amount of that order number, we really don't want an approximation. And then of course,
we close the function with a matching parenthesis. One other thing, because we're going to put this entire table in a formula,
we need to make sure that we're referring to the table with an absolute reference, because we're going to put in the
VLOOKUP function, and then we want to autofill down. That is we want to copy and paste down the formula all the way
down a couple 100 rows. Understanding absolute references is beyond the scope of this tutorial. But suffice to say it could
be a little messy when you're using an absolute reference in a long formula. So what I find it's easier to do is to create a
range name. When you give a name to a range like to this whole table that we have, then you could use that name in your
formulas. First, I'll show you how to create a range name and axonal works the same way on Windows or Mac, and that'll
show you how to create a range name in Google Sheets. Now the range itself, you have a choice. You can have it include
the column headers, or you can have it be just the data below the column headers In the written version of this tutorial, I
included the column headers. So just to be a little different this time, I'm going to include only the data and not the actual
column headers. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to click over here on cell A five. So that's the first cell of actual data.
And I want to select down and across to the last cell here. So in Windows, I'll press Ctrl Shift end, if you're using a Mac,
you want to press Command Shift, and, and you see that selects all the way down and across to the last cell. Now to apply
the name, I click up here in the Name box now not on the drop down, but on the actual box here. And when you do that,
you see that cell reference gets highlighted. And I'm just going to call it data, you could call it almost anything you want.
You can't have spaces or dashes in the name, though, and you're limited to 33 characters. So I'll just call this data and press
the Enter key. And there it is, you can see that data is up there in the Name box. And we know that works, because I can
click somewhere over here. And then when I click this down arrow and choose data, you can see it's selected. And again, I
did not include the column headers. Creating range names is a little different in Google Sheets. So here I have the same
exact worksheet. And you can see I'm in my web browser. So I'll click on the same first bit of data, we can't select from a
cell down and across in Google Sheets, you have to select first across and then down or first down and then across. So I'll
press Ctrl, Shift, right arrow, or if we are on the Mac, Command, Shift, right arrow, and now I'll press Control Shift, Down
Arrow, or on the Mac, Command, Shift down arrow. Now that I've done that, I go up to the Data menu, and over here, I
choose named and protected ranges. And then in this box over here, I'll call it, data, and then click Done. And you can see
it's over there. And then I'm done with that, I can close this little panel with that x. So in this tutorial, this is the only thing
that's different between Google Sheets and Excel. Okay, so let's enter some formulas already enough talking. Right now I'm
on the source data sheet. Let's click on the sale amounts sheet. And you can see I already have the order numbers. And what
we want to do is use the order number to look up the sales amount that I was talking about. So let's start entering the formula,
say equals V lookup. And if you get that little syntax error, you don't have to type the whole thing, just press the Tab key.
And it gives us a little bit of syntax helping the lookup value we know is that order number, so I click that and I type a
comma. Now the table array, that's the table we had. So we don't have to go back to the source data sheet and select all that
and make it an absolute reference, because we already called a data. So all I have to do is type the word data. Now, if you
did not create the range name, you will have to go to the source data sheet and select the whole thing and make it an absolute
reference. Also, Excel understands that, oh, yes, I did create that range name. So it's in here, I'll show you also a little trick.
Let me just backspace over that. Let's say I have a lot of range names, or I created that range name a long time ago, I don't
remember what it is, I can always press the f3 key on the keyboard and get the paste name box and just double click it and
I'll type a comma. And then it asked me for the column index number we said before, that's column eight, that's where the
sales figure is put in a comma. And here it's even giving us a little syntax help. Do we want true or do we want false? We
want an exact match. So you could type the word false. Or you could double click it. And it puts it in, close a parenthesis
and right. And it's 40. And in fact, if we go back here, source data, we can see Oh, yes, indeed, that's correct. So let's go
back here. And we want to autofill this. So click the cell. And if you're not all that familiar with autofilling, you notice that
there's a little.in, the lower right corner of the cell, when you put the mouse pointer over the dot, the mouse pointer becomes
this little crosshair. And even if you know autofill, here's something that most people don't know, you don't have to click
and drag this down for 200, whatever rows, all you have to do is double click the crosshair. And it fills in all the way down
so you can scroll all the way down. And you can see it's filled in all the way. That's because there are no gaps in column A,
if there's a gap somewhere in column A, then that autofill just kind of stopped where that gap is. If you want to practice this
on your own, you can go here and maybe to Column C or column D and go and use VLOOKUP to find maybe people's last
names or the states. So let's take a look at the MATCH function, we can click the Match tab here in the worksheet. As I said
earlier, the MATCH function isn't really concerned with the value of data, but location of data actually, it's kind of like the
game of Jeopardy.You tell it what the value is. And the MATCH function tells you where the value is kind of a think of
maybe you're walking down the street and you say to somebody, oh, where is number 135. And they tell you Oh, number
135 is the fourth building down. So let's talk a little bit about the syntax of the MATCH function, we say equals match, open
the parenthesis, right, just like any function, and then you put in the lookup value, that's just like what we were talking about
before, that's going to be the order number, put in a comma, and you have the table range table range is the same as what
we were talking about before. In our case, we're going to use the entire table, you put in a comma, and then you enter the
type. Now what's that type all about? When you have that value you're looking for, you may have a value that's just above
it, or just below it. And to determine whether or not either of those are acceptable. That type, you can put in negative one
zero or a one, negative one means you'll choose the number that's the closest above it. If you choose a positive one, it's the
closest number below it. If you choose zero, it means you want an exact match. Also, with the MATCH function, you have
to be aware of whether your data are sorted in any particular order. So you have to have data sorted in descending order to
use the negative one option, you have to have your data sorted in ascending order. If you're going to use the positive one
option, and you can see that's the default. Or if you don't care if it's in one order or another, then you can use a zero. And
since we're looking for only one piece of data, we're looking for that order number, we need to go into find another range
name. So let's go back to source data. And we're going to be concerned just with the order number. So we already have a
range name, that's for the entire table. Now we just want a range name for the data going down column A. So kind of like
what we did before, you want to click on cell A five, press Ctrl, Shift, Down Arrow or Command Shift down arrow on the
Mac. Let's go up here, click inside the Name box. And I'm going to call this order underscore. Number underscores are okay
dashes or not spaces are not okay. And press enter. If you're doing this in Google Sheets, use the same procedure that I
showed you just before. So let's go back to the match worksheet, and we'll put in the function will say equals match, open
the parenthesis lookup value, we said. That's the order number, comma, the lookup array, right? That's what we just put in
the order number, if you want, you could press the f3 key. And you can see there's the two range names, double click, type
in a comma. And we have our values and ascending order. So I'm going to choose the one click it was a parenthesis and
enter it. And now we can see that order 1013 is in the 13th position. Now if you had included the column headers, then this
would be showing 14. And we could eyeball this, let's go back here. And we can see there is order 1013, if we count from
the top. That is the 13th One down. Finally, let's talk about the index function. And I'm going to click on the index tab of
this worksheet. The index function is kind of like the opposite of the MATCH function. And it deals with two dimensions.
It deals with rows and columns. So we tell it, here's the row number and the column number I'm looking for, which means
a particular cell now returned to me the value that's in that particular cell. So let's take a brief look at the syntax of the index
function, we say equals index, open the parenthesis. first argument is the table range or data range. Again, it's the entire
table that we've been looking at put in a comma, and then you have the row number, put in a comma, and then optionally
the column number. Now, this is a little weird, because the official documentation tells us that column number is optional.
But it's really the row number could also be optional. And what that means is, when you have a large table, like what we're
working with, you do want a row number and a column number. But let's say I only have a single row, well then you don't
need a column number. Or if you only have a single column, then you don't need a row number. So let's put in the function,
and I'm going to be here on cell C six. So I'm going to say equals index, open the parenthesis. And just like before the ranges
the entire data range, you can see it finds it for us. So we put in a comma, and we want row nine, comma, column three,
close the parenthesis, enter it and now we can see that that is somebodies last name. And let's take a look go back to source
data. And we can see there, it's the ninth row down and third column over if we go back here and now let's say just for
example, maybe I want to go to row 13. And see it's already changing column four, then I have the state. So if I go back
over here, I can see all right, there it is. This is row 13, Column four. So having these three functions that can look at a large
worksheet, and extract value and positioning of data are really great tools. This way, you can have one sheet that has all of
the data in the universe, and then individual sheets, where you're picking up just those pieces of data that you need. And of
all of the parts of Excel that people ask me about VLOOKUP is far and away the most common. So I hope you found this
tutorial helpful. Once again, for tuts Plus, my name is Bob Flusser. And I'll see you down the road.

COMBINING DATA FROM MULTIPLE CELLS IN EXCEL

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to easily combine data from more than one cell in Excel. So let's look at this
spreadsheet here. This is a customer relationship tracker for a hypothetical company. And these are all customers of this
company, you can see that their first name is here last name in a separate column, the total amount of purchases that they've
made from the company and some other data. So what if I would like to combine some of this data together, let's say to
produce a customer profile. And to put that information in one column here at the right. So I can just click here in G two,
and I'll just type customer profile looks like it did not copy the format. I'll just click here on the cell whose format I want to
copy. And I'll go here on the Home tab Home ribbon, click the Format Painter and then click here. And it makes the format
the same. Okay, so watch how I can do this, how I can add the word Gina to the word Polen. And let's say the total amount
of purchases that they've made in dollars. So I'll just click here in cell G three, and I'll type equals, so this cell equals, and I
want it to equal Gina. So I click on Gina. And then I also wanted to include the word Polen. But if I click on Polen, it
changes to be three. So what if I click Jeena plus Polen and hit return? Look, Excel doesn't understand it doesn't seem to
compute, you know, how do you add a name plus another name? So the way you do this properly is you type equals click
on Gina and then you type an ampersand or some people just call it the end sign So a three ampersand colon. Now watch
what happens if I tap enter or return on the keyboard? It says Gina Polin, it combined the contents of cell a three with the
contents of cell B three. Now there's a problem here, there's no space between Gina and Polen. So let's fix that. All I have
to do to put a space in is after the ampersand type in quotation marks a space using the spacebar and then quotation marks
again, and then type an ampersand again. So what this should do is it connects whatever is in a three with a space, and then
it connects that with whatever's in v3. So I tap Return or Enter on the keyboard, and it worked. Now let's change it even
more, I want to add now the total purchases. So I'll just add another ampersand, and I should probably put a space in there
again, or maybe a colon. Let's try a colon. And then I put the close quote another ampersand, and maybe I want another
space in there. So I put in quote, space, close quote, another ampersand. And now I'm going to click on the total amount of
purchases here, and tap, enter on the keyboard or return if you're using a Mac. And look what we have G Napolean, $40. If
I really wanted to get picky with this, I could go in and add $1 sign. So after the last ampersand quotation marks, dollar sign
quotation marks, I'll need another ampersand, tap Return or Enter on the keyboard. And now that looks just how I want it
to look. So this is a very simple customer profile, but it lets me know the names of the customers who have purchased the
most from us over the years. Now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to do that again, for every single one of these customers,
right? Well, actually, no, all I have to do is click on Gina pullin $40, and go to the autofill handle, I'm going to zoom in on
this a little bit, but you can see it here. Anytime you've clicked on a cell in the lower right corner of that cell, there should
be a very small square, you can see it there, it's green. And that is the autofill handle. And what it does is that it copies when
you click and drag it, it copies whatever is in the cell that is selected. Now sometimes it doesn't just copy it extends. And if
you haven't watched my tutorial on the autofill handle, you really need to do that. But in this case, I really do just want to
copy whatever is in this cell. Now some of you might say no, you don't you don't want to copy Gina pull in $40. Well, if
you think about it, that's not really what's in this cell. If I double click on that cell, or if I just click on it once and look up
here at the formula bar, you can see that this is actually a formula. It's not just Gina pullin $40. So I want to copy that
formula down this column. So I'll click and hold that autofill handle and just drag down the sheet and release and look what
it did. It combined the first name, the last name, and combine that with the total sales from each customer. Now just one
thing to take note of the results here in column G, they end up being treated like text. So these aren't really numerical, they
have numbers included. But if I were to do an Auto Sum, it doesn't really know how to handle that. Because these aren't
really numbers. They're just formulas that combine text with numbers, and the result is treated basically like text. And I
really think the more you use Excel, the more you'll see opportunities to use the ampersand to combine data from more than
one cell and pull that data together into one cell. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you
did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook,
Pinterest and Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers
and students. And when you do subscribe, consider clicking the bell next to the subscribe button. If you do you'll be notified
whenever I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you'd like to support my
YouTube channel, consider becoming a supporter of mine through my Patreon account, and you'll see a link to that in the
description below.

CREATING EASY DATA ENTRY FORMS IN EXCEL

In this tutorial, I will show you an easy way to create data entry forms in Excel. And these forms make it so much easier to
enter records or data into Excel. You can see here on the screen, I have a pretty simple spreadsheet. This is an employee list
with names hire dates, employee numbers and departments. Let's say that a business has decided that they want to have an
employee sheet. And this is just the beginning of setting up that employee list. Now imagine how time consuming and
painful it would be to enter all of this data for let's say 200 employees, yes, you can do it, you can just click on the appropriate
cell, you can type tab over type, but doing it this way, can lead to more mistakes. And so let's look at how to set up an easy
data entry form in Excel. The first step that I'm going to have to take is to go up here to the quick access bar. This is a handy
bar where you can add additional tools and features that you want to be able to access easily and quickly. That's why it's
called the Quick Access Toolbar. And if you haven't already watched my previous tutorial on how to customize the Quick
Access Toolbar, please do so. But for the purposes of this video, I'm just going to click here on this button. This is the
Customize Quick Access toolbar button. When you click that, it gives you a list of some of the items that you can add to
the Quick Access toolbar or take off the Quick Access Toolbar. But if you look toward the bottom of this pop up menu,
there's an option for more commands. And I'm going to click that it takes me to a list of popular Excel commands. But in
this case, what we're looking for is not necessarily popular. So I'm going to go down to either all commands or Commands
Not in ribbon, I'll just pick Commands Not in ribbon. And what I'm looking for is form. That's what I'm trying to create a
quick, easy data entry form. So I'm going to browse down look for form. There it is I click on it. And if you'll notice here
on the right side, there are some items already in this list. compare those to what's up above here on my Quick Access
Toolbar. It's the same things. The same features are listed here, as are here in the upper left. So I want to add form to that
list. Having selected form, I just click Add, it's now added to this list. And when I click on OK, it will now be added to my
Quick Access Toolbar. So there it is, now that I have that button readily accessible to me, I will be able to easily create a
data entry form for my Excel spreadsheet. Alright, the next thing we need to do is take this data that I have here in my
spreadsheet and turn it into a table for some reason that's a prerequisite of using these quick forms. So how to turn this into
a table. All I have to do is click somewhere inside the data how about here and then here on the Home tab home ribbon. In
the Styles group, there's a button that says format as table now there is a faster way to do it. Once you've clicked anywhere
in the data. You can just hold the Ctrl key and tap T for table. And that will bring up this pop up. And here Excel has tried
to guess what my data consists of. And in 99% of the cases, it does it correctly, you'll notice that there's a dashed line that's
kind of moving across the top here, and on the left, and on the right, that is outlining the shape of the table. And in most
cases, it gets it perfectly correct. If not, you may need to change some of the numbers here, you may need to click this and
then outline what you want to be included. Or you might need to check or uncheck my table has headers, I'm just going to
click OK. Let's see if it works. It looks like it did, I can tell that Excel has identified these items here as headers, so I think
that worked just fine. And now let's move on to the next step. At this point, I just want to have clicked somewhere in the
table. So I'll just make sure that I've done that I click and now I go up here to the Quick Access toolbar and click the Form
button. Now notice what it did. It has identified 22 records or rows in this table. It doesn't count the header row, it just skips
it. But you'll notice that record number one is Gina pullin here at the left, but all of the data and information related to Gina
pullin is listed vertically in this case instead of horizontally. Now there are a couple of reasons why this is helpful. One of
them is let's say you have a spreadsheet with like 14 columns are 15 columns, you wouldn't want to have to click this bar
and drag to the right and type in the data or to tab over up to 14 times in order to enter in your data. It's kind of cumbersome
to do it that way. And so that's why you might want to do what I'm showing here by creating an easy data entry form. Now
if I click Find Next, look what it does. It goes to the next record Mar Selena Restrepo, click Find Next again, Regina Loftus,
and so forth. And it's numbering those records here at the top right, so I can click through those. Now let's say it's time to
resume entering data for the employees of this company, I can click New notice it says new record, I just click and next
name, I'll type the next employee's name. If I tap tab, it does move to the next data entry sell hire date. Now you can just
type that in the way you typically would maybe with the day than the month in the year, or you can hold the Ctrl key and
tap semicolon. And that puts today's date into the form in this case, Gary Larson was not hired today. So I will go ahead
and change that to a different date, put in the employee number. And I can either click to the next cell in this entry form, or
I can tab just like I did before, put in the department. And at this point, I can tap Enter on the keyboard, it inserts the record
into my spreadsheet and gives me a new blank form. If I close and browse down the page, you can see there's Gary Larson,
hire date, employee number and department. Jumping back into the form is super easy. I just go up here on the Quick Access
toolbar, click form. I'm right back in there, I want to enter a new employee and I simply resume. So if you do a lot of data
entry, you're going to find yourself really preferring these easy data entry forms that you can create and use in Excel. And
it's really easy to do. While we're here in this form tool, I want to point out some of the other features and buttons that we
have. So we've looked already at New notice that there's also delete. So this is a mistake. Obviously, I don't know how I
made that one. But I can just click Delete, displayed record will be permanently deleted. That's exactly what I want. So I
click OK. And it's gone. We also have a find previous button. So that goes from number 25 to number 24, to record number
23, etc. You can also find next that advances to hire numbers. And then we have a Criteria button and a Restore button.
Let's look at the restore button. So I'm going to click find previous a few times here we have a person named Eileen
Osterberg. And let's say that the company is considering changing her department from sales to customer service. So I can
just type that in. But what if I realized that that was a mistake, I can just click Restore, and it goes right back to the way it
was before I started changing the data in this form. So as long as you don't click close or tap Enter on the keyboard,
everything that you type here is easy to undo just by clicking the Restore button. Okay, one button left to look at besides
close and that is criteria. The way criteria works is you click it and then you enter criteria into this form. And then Excel
will see if it can find one or more of the records here in the spreadsheet that match the criteria. So for example, I would
really like to find someone who has a name that includes the word Bob, and the hire date doesn't really matter. The employee
number doesn't really matter, but the department should be communications. Alright, so I have Bob and communications at
this point, all I have to do is tap Enter on the keyboard. And look, it found Bob in communications, there is now you may
at first think that this number here in the upper right indicates that there are 25 or 18 Bob's in communication. But if you
click Next, you'll notice that's really all there is just one Bob in communications. So what if I want to see everyone in
communications, not just Bob. To do that, I'm going to close the forum, open it back up and go to criteria put in
communications, tap Enter on the keyboard, and now look, it found Regina Loftus, if I click next, Palma Neumeister. And
there is good old Bob again. So I hope that you see how useful and Excel data entry form can be. It can take your data entry
task that might be too horizontal, and it can make it vertical. And notice that you can scroll so it could be 10 15 20 different
bits of data that you're entering in, and it makes them vertical, not horizontal, and it gives you these tools at the right to also
help you to search within the table that you've created. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If
you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook,
Pinterest and Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers
and students. And when you do subscribe, click the bell next to the subscribe button. That way you'll be notified whenever
I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you'd like to support my channel,
consider becoming a supporter of mine through my Patreon account, and you'll see a link to that in the description below.

REMOVE DUPLICATES TOOL IN EXCEL

In this Excel tutorial, we're going to focus on duplicates. So you can see here I have a spreadsheet of synth pop bands and
albums. And this spreadsheet belongs to a hypothetical synthpop CD store. And you can see there's a list here of some of
the classic synth pop bands and their latest releases. But I'm also including here, some more recent synthpop bands and ones
that you may not have heard of before. Now the problem with this spreadsheet, though, is when I initially created it, I was
focusing on the different quarters of the year, quarter one, quarter two, quarter three. And so the result is that I end up with
several different records for each band. And that's what I wanted in this spreadsheet to begin with. But let's say I decide,
You know what, I just want to create a list of all of the bands whose music I sell. Or maybe I want to create a list just of all
of the albums that I'm selling. Let's look at how we could do that, what I have to do is just go to data and look on the data
ribbon. In the Data Tools group, you'll notice that there's an option to remove duplicates. When you click that by default,
it's probably going to check all of your columns. So it's going to look for duplicates throughout the entire spreadsheet at this
point. And that may not be what I want. If I just want to see a list of the unique band titles in my spreadsheet, all I have to
do is unselect all and then choose band. So it's going to look for duplicates only in the list of bands. I click OK. It found 33
duplicates, and remove them 15 unique values remain. So I click OK. And look at that it now is a list just of the bands whose
CDs I hypothetically sell. So that's how you can remove duplicates, and how you can pull out just the unique data in your
spreadsheet. So now of course, I could go up and choose File, Save As and I could save this as a different separate
spreadsheet. That's just a list of all the bands. And then here in my original spreadsheet if I wanted to keep the list the way
it was, I could just exit out and not save over the original, and I should be able to have both copies of the spreadsheet. So I
think Remove Duplicates is a very useful tool. I hope that you found the tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please click the
like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And
definitely subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for
another video from me at least every Monday. If you'd like to learn more about some of these bands mentioned in the video,
please see the description below. And if you want to support my YouTube channel, please consider becoming a patron of
mine through my Patreon account and you'll find links to that in the description below. And speaking of Patreon, I want to
give a quick shout out to my first $5 supporter, and that is Sharman Natoli. So thank you, I appreciate your support so much.
I'm also grateful for the $1 supporters that I have. And for all of you considering becoming a patron of mine. It's great
supporters like Sharman Natoli that helped keep this YouTube channel alive. Thank you

FIXING COMMON EXCEL ERRORS – PART 1: DIV/0, N/A, & NAME

In this tutorial, we're going to look at how to fix common Excel errors. And this is the first in a three part series. In part one,
we're going to look at the div zero error, the N A error, and the name error. And to help with this, I have a workbook with
three unrelated spreadsheets, each one is a good example of one of those errors. If you would like to follow along with me
in the description below this video, I have a link that you can use to download this workbook. And it makes it so much
easier to follow along. But let's get started. First, with the div zero error, you can see my spreadsheet here is tracking my
purchase history for some supplies. And you can see I'm getting a div zero error a couple of times here in the spreadsheet.
Well, what this stands for is dividing by zero. dividing by zero, as you probably know, is not possible. And so because it's
impossible, when I tried to do it, I get this error message in Excel. So what's happening here? Well, I have a formula set up,
you can see it here, where what's happening is it's dividing the total cost of a particular item tape, in this case by the quantity
that I purchased, and it gives me the total cost per item. So this is being divided by this. Okay, so let's look at the next row.
Here, I have nothing zero basically, divided by zero, well, that produces an error message, because it's not possible to divide
zero by zero, it's not possible to divide 100 by zero either. So that error message is accurate. It's telling me the truth, there's
an error going on here. The thing is, it looks so bad, it looks so ugly in my spreadsheet. So how can I fix that. And you can
see, there's another example of it down here. Well, one way to fix it would be to not divide by zero. So if I go out and buy
a box of markers, let's say it's $6, and I get one box, now that I have something other than zero in this cell, it updates and
there's no error message. But what if I don't want to buy a box of markers or don't need to? Well, let's just zero those out.
And now what I'll do instead is I'll change up my formula. So I'm going to go back up here to cell f2. Click on the cell. And
I'm going to delete what's there in the formula bar, I of course, could do the same thing here inside the cell. But sometimes
it's nice to use this formula bar, it's just a little bit cleaner sometimes. So I'll type equals, and then I'll start out with something
called if error, it's kind of a weird function to use. But notice what it says returns value if error if expression is an error and
the value of the expression itself otherwise, so this basically helps guard against errors and produces something if there is
an error. Okay, so if error, left parenthesis, and now I'll put in the total cost for the tape. So D two, so I type in D two,
divided by E two, and then I put in a comma, and then after the comma, look what it's expecting, it's expecting the value if
error. So if there is an error in cell F two, based on dividing 60 by 32, if there's an error, what do I want it to print on the
screen? Well, I could just put two quotes, or a quotation mark a space and another quotation mark, and then close parenthesis,
you really don't need the space in between though. Now I'll just tap Enter on the keyboard. And look, there wasn't an error.
And so it just produced the result of D two divided by E two. And now I'll drag that down all the way down to the bottom
and release. What changed? Well, the div zero errors went away. And why, because of this new formula, it's checking for
an error. And if there is an error, I tell it to print nothing in the cell. And I copied that down using the autofill handle. So
that's true of all of this column. So that's one way to handle it. Another way would be to instead of putting nothing in the
cell, I could put a message to the person who's looking at the spreadsheet, I could type in something like no purchases. So
that would explain why it's blank. There have been no purchases. So I tap Enter, and notice that it updated the entire column,
probably because I'm in a table, it did it that way. So now instead of the ugly error code, I get this no purchases message.
So that's a little bit about the div zero error in Excel. Let's move on to another spreadsheet and look at a second error that
comes up from time to time. And this is the N A error. And this comes up most often when you're using VLOOKUP or H
lookup or any other function or tool in Excel where it's looking for a specific thing. So you can see here I have a movie
inventory and I'm Using VLOOKUP, to tell me the rating of various movies. So I can click here, type in The Martian, tap,
enter on the keyboard, and it tells me PG 13. So that's using VLOOKUP. If you haven't already watched my tutorial on
VLOOKUP, you're missing out, you need to watch that. But for the purposes of this tutorial, let's just move on. And watch
what happens when I type the Lion King, I tap Enter, and I get the N A error. So you can probably figure out the reason
why I'm getting an A, because it's searching the spreadsheet, it's searching the data that I've provided for the Lion King, and
it's not available, it's not finding it. Now watch what happens if I put the Lion King into this spreadsheet. So the Lion King,
and I'll put in the 2019 version of it. So I've put that information in. Now let's go back up and try it again, The Lion King, I
tap Enter, it still doesn't work, I still get that in a error. Now if you get an error like that, and you're pretty confident that the
words that you're looking for are in the range that you're looking in. That could be for a couple of different reasons. In this
case, it could be that I've accidentally put in too many spaces in a cell. So for example, here the Lion King, notice that there's
an extra space after the G when I search for the Lion King without a space, it doesn't work. If I add a space in here after the
JE, will it work? Will it fix it? Yes, it does. But instead of fixing the search term here, there is a way to actually fix the data.
And it could be that other movie titles also have too many spaces included. So I want to repair that data to make sure that
there are no extra spaces. To do that there may be a better way. But this is how I would do it, I would just right click here
on column B and choose insert. So that gives me a new column. And then here in the column, I'll click on cell B three, tap
equals, and then the word trim. Left parenthesis, I'm going to trim the title Star Wars, and then I should put a right
parenthesis, you don't really have to, but it's a good idea to get in that habit. I'll tap Enter. And it seems like nothing changed.
And that's true, nothing changed. But the reason why is because Star Wars didn't have an extra space in it. But some of these
other titles do. So now that that's done, I'll use the autofill handle, click and drag down the page to copy that formula. And
now I want to replace what's in column A with what's in column B. But the tricky thing is column B is really made up of
just formulas that depend on column A. So I do have to be a little careful with this. But I'm just going to call this title as
well. And then I'm going to click and drag from title all the way down to the bottom of my data. And then I will copy that
either by right clicking and choosing copy, or Ctrl C to copy. And then I'll click here and right click, but I don't want to just
paste if I paste there will be some errors. But if I go here to paste values, what it does is it converts these formulas into actual
values, in this case titles of movies. So now I don't need this column anymore, I can right click on B, choose Delete. And
that should have cleaned up all of these titles. It should have trimmed out extra spaces. And look it worked. So now when I
type in The Lion King, it tells me the rating. Let me show you another example of how you could have the correct data in
the sheet. But it still gives you the N A error. A few years ago, a movie came out called 42. So I'll just type in 42. I don't
recall exactly the year that came out. But I'll put in some data for it. Okay, so now that that's in, if I do a search for 42, it's
going to work, it finds it it says it's PG 13. But from time to time, that might not work for you. And if it doesn't, it probably
has to do with the number format. So right now this number in this cell is considered to be a number. But in some cases, it
might be considered to be a text. 42 is actually the title of the movie, it's not really just a raw number. So if you're ever doing
a VLOOKUP, and it gives you an NA error, and you're dealing with numbers, you might consider making sure that the
column or row is formatted correctly, either as text in this case or as numbers just to make sure that these cells match the
format of this cell. Now similarly to my purchase history example, I can fix this. I can make it so that if I type in a movie
that's not in my collection, I don't get this ugly error message. The way that I would fix that is I would click on the cell and
change the formula in front of VLOOKUP. I'm going to click in front of the V I'm just going to type if error, left parenthesis,
and then after the vlookup information, I'll put a comma. And then in quotes, I'm just going to put the message that I want
to send to the user of this spreadsheet, not in inventory, put in the quote, put in the right parenthesis, and then I'll tap Enter
on the keyboard, Starman is not in inventory. So now if I type in Star Trek, that's also not in inventory. But if I type the
BFG, it is there and has a rating of PG. So once again, this if error function saves the day, and makes our spreadsheets look
not so ugly, when these error messages come up, there's one more error message that we're going to tackle in this video.
And that is the name error. In another video, I show you how to name cells in Excel. And I've done that in this spreadsheet.
This is a health tracker for Jason Smith. And notice that the cell that has his age in it, Cell B three has been renamed, it's
called age. And I've also renamed B four, I've called that height. So now when I want to calculate the BMI or body mass
index for Jason, I can just click here, type equals, and then I'll grab his weight. So B seven, multiplied by 703, divided by,
and I can just type in the word height, and it should grab the data that's in the cell called height in this case before, but what
if I misspell height? What if I type in something like that, and then I continue on with my formula, which would look
something like this. And then I tap Enter on the keyboard, Look, I get a name error. And what this is trying to tell me is
Excel thinks I might have used the wrong name. And I did instead of spelling height correctly, when I was trying to reference
the cell called height, I spelled it incorrectly. And so there is a name problem. And that's why I get the name error message.
So how do you fix that, you just need to be careful. Whenever you see that name error, it usually means that you've typed
something incorrectly, you've misspelled it, or maybe there isn't a cell named this exact thing. So you need to check to make
sure that you've used the correct words spelled correctly. One way to do that with named cells is just go here to the upper
left corner, this is the name box. And if you click this arrow, it gives you a list of all of the names that you've used in this
workbook or spreadsheet. So you can see height, it's spelled that way. That's how I need to spell it when I'm typing. Another
example of this error could be when you're trying to do a sum or really any other function. So let's say I tried to type sum,
and I want to sum this entire column, left parenthesis, B, one through B 59. And I tap Enter, and that works fine. But what
if I accidentally leave the M off of some and I tap Enter? Well, that doesn't make sense. Some without the M is just not
going to work. And so Excel is telling me there's a naming problem, you'll have the same problem if you try to do an average.
But instead of typing out average, what if you just put a VG, it's going to give you a name error. One more thing to watch
for when you get that name error message, it's possible that the reason why is because in your formula, you've used clouts
when you shouldn't use clouts, or you needed to use quotes. So for example, in this case, I've added clouts around the word
height. When I tap Enter, I get an error message. It's a little bit different error message. But still, that is something also to
watch out for. So those are three common Excel errors, Div divided by zero, and a and name. In a future video, I'll look at
other error messages, including null, num, ref and value. In the meantime, I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If
you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook,
Pinterest and Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers
and students. And when you do subscribe, click the bell next to the subscribe button. That way you'll be notified whenever
I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday. If you'd like to support my channel,
become a supporter of mine through my Patreon account, and you'll see a link to that in the description below.

FIXING COMMON EXCEL ERRORS- PART 2: NULL, NUM & ####

This video is fixing common Excel problems part two, it's the second in a three-part series on some strategies to try in order
to fix common Excel errors. And I have a spreadsheet here to go along with this video. I hope that you'll download it by
looking in the description below the video and this workbook should look pretty familiar. If you watched part one, you can
see that it has still the div zero error message if you want to learn how to fix the div zero error message please watch part
one. Here in part two, we're going to look at some strategies for fixing the null error, the num error and the hashtag error.
Let's start first with null. The main reason why you will see the null error is If you use a space in your formula, when you
actually should use a comma, or some other symbol, so let's do an example. Let's say I would like to add up the total cost
of the first eight items in this list and the last five or six items. So I want to leave out some of the things here in the middle,
like shipping envelopes, I don't want to include those. So to do this, I'm going to go here off to the right, let's just say G
four. It doesn't have to be there, though. And I'll type equals, so this cell equals the sum of what? Well, I'll put in a left
parenthesis, and then I'm going to click and drag, I could type the cell references here, but I'll just click and drag to get the
first eight or so items in this list. Okay, so I want to add that. But I also wanted to add, let's say erasers on down. So let's say
here in the formula, I put a space, and then I go down to erasers and I click and drag and get the remaining items. So back
up here on my formula, you can see what it looks like, I'll tap enter or return on the keyboard, but it gives me a nil error.
Now the reason for that is because of this space here, I should not have put a space there, whenever you put a space in that
situation or similar situations, what it does is it tries to identify an intersection of two ranges it's looking for where two
ranges intersect. Well guess what this range that I selected does not intersect with this range, there is no intersection. And
that's why it produces an error message. No, there is no intersection between those two ranges. So instead of a space, what
I really meant to do and should have done was put a comma. Now if I tap Enter on the keyboard, it's adding up this range.
And it's adding up that range and putting them together, and it gives me 1757. So if you do see this null error, double check
your formula, make sure you're using the proper symbols and don't have extra spaces, many times that will solve the error.
Next, let's look at the num error. And for this one, I'm going to switch to the health tracker spreadsheet in my workbook.
And as you can see, this health tracker is a way to track the health of Jason Smith, he's trying to lose weight. And you can
see here, his weight and the change from the previous week. And that's being tracked with a formula, you can see the formula
there, it's pretty easy, pretty simple. Who knows why but let's just say that I've got to know the square root of how many
pounds Jason lost from week to week. Well, I could do that I could type in equals SQ RT. Notice it says returns the square
root of a number. And what's the number, it's this right here. So I click there, and then I'll put in the left parenthesis, and I
need to now put in the number. So I'll click here on the number zero in this case, but it's actually clicking not on the number
but on the cell reference, see seven, and then I'll tap Enter on the keyboard. And there you've got the results, square root of
zero is zero. Now I'm going to use the autofill handle this little green square in the lower right corner of the cell. I'll just
click on that and hold the click and then drag down the page. And it copied that formula down. And it worked beautifully
except for a couple of num errors. Now why am I getting these num errors? Basically, you'll see num errors when you have
a formula that tries to produce an invalid number. So if you tell Excel to do an impossible calculation, it's not going to be
able to do it, it's impossible. So it may give you this num error. So why is this impossible? Well, I told Excel to give me the
square root of negative four. And if you know how square root works, there's just no possible way to get the square root of
minus four, because it's a negative number. Same thing with negative three, it's just not possible to get the square root of it.
So anytime you see this num error, double check your formula, double check your data and make sure that you're not asking
the impossible of Excel, a way to fix that would be to simply change negative numbers to zero. But in this case, that would
not reflect reality. And so instead, you may want to do an if error formula. Hopefully you can see how I'm doing this. So
equals if error left parenthesis and then the formula that I was using before, and then I'll put in a comma, and then quotation
marks and quotation marks. So basically that will print on the screen, a blank space, nothing and then I can put the right
parenthesis and tap Enter on the keyboard. So now if I copy that formula down, you'll notice what it does. If there is a Num
error, it wipes it out and pretends like there is not an error. If there are no errors, then it performs the formula just as I had
created it up here with the square root. Now there are other cases, when you'll see the num error, it's technically possible for
the num error to appear when a number is too big for Excel or too small for Excel, this rarely happens, I bet you'll never
have this happen. But the biggest number that Excel can display is a number one with 308 zeros after it. And if you try to
go higher than that, it's gonna produce a Num error. So to demonstrate this, I'm going to type equals in this cell. So this cell
equals, let's say 2000 raised to the power of and the way you show that is with this little caret symbol. For me, it's shift six
on the keyboard, and then I'll just type in, let's say 7676. So I'm going to raise 2000 to the power of 7676. Let's try that I tap
Enter on the keyboard, that gives me an error message. Because my formula produced a number so big, it was bigger than
the number one with 308 zeros after it. And so Excel just cannot display it. Now, that's also true of negative numbers. If I
try to type in or calculate a number that is smaller than minus one with 308 zeros behind that, that's also going to produce a
Num error. Because the number is too small for Excel to display. There are some other reasons why you might see the num
error, they're pretty rare. But watch out for those two examples that I've shared. The third error message that we're going to
look at in this video is pretty simple, pretty easy, and very common. And I'm going to use this third spreadsheet, the movie
Inventory spreadsheet. So here I have a list of movies and the cost that was paid to buy these movies in DVD format. So
I'm going to go down here to the bottom underneath them. And I would like to get a grand total. So I'll just go up here and
use this AutoSum button here on the Home tab home ribbon in the Editing group, I can just click that, and it will auto sum
everything in that column, I tap Enter on the keyboard. But look, I get this terrible, ugly looking hashtag error. Now the
reason for this is very simple. And the fix is very simple. What this symbol means is simply that Excel cannot fit the contents
of this cell in the space provided. And you'll notice if I go up here to the column letter D, I'm going to go to the line between
D and E, I can click and drag. And I can make that even more narrow if I want. And if I do that, notice that the text that was
there before turns into hashtags. So that shows that it's really just about space, it's about being able to display the contents
of the cell. The solution for this is super easy. All you have to do is click and drag to provide more space for that column.
And that way the contents of all of these cells show up and can fit in the space provided there is an even easier way to do
this, all you would have to do is double click on the line between D and D in this case, so just double click and that
automatically resizes the column to the perfect width so that everything can be displayed. So we've looked at three common
error messages, no num and the hashtag error, and I've shown you some of the best techniques for resolving those errors.
Watch for part three in this series where I'll cover the ref error and the value error. If you found this tutorial to be helpful,
please like follow and subscribe and when you do subscribe, click the bell next to the subscribe button. If you do you'll be
notified whenever I post another video. If you'd like to support my channel, become a supporter of mine through my Patreon
account and you'll see a link to that in the description below.
 FIXING COMMON EXCEL ERRORS- PART 3: REF AND VALUE

This is fixing common Excel errors part three. This is the third video in a three-part series on how to fix common Excel
errors. In this particular video, we're going to focus on two different common errors. One is the ref error, and the other is
the value error. You can see the spreadsheet we're going to use this is an inventory with a list of supplies where they're
stored and some other details about them like the number of packages the quantity per package, and then we have a formula
to calculate, okay, if there are 20 packages of batteries and six batteries per package, we have 120 Total batteries. And like
I say that's calculated automatically with this formula. Now to illustrate the ref error, let's say that I decide that you know
what this data here is really not necessary, I don't need to know the quantity per package, I just need to know the total
quantity. So what if I just go in and delete columns C and D, I just clicked and dragged from C to D, it's selected the entire
columns, and I'll just delete, you can see what happened. I got a ref error. And the reason for the ref error is the formula
referred to cells that no longer exist in this formula, those cells are completely gone, I deleted the entire columns, those cells
are gone. I'm going to click away and undo that with Ctrl Z to bring it back. And you can see that solves the problem. Now
what if I just delete one cell, I right click on the cell, I click Delete, Excel is going to shift cells around to try to replace the
cell I'm destroying. And you can see what it did it ruined the formula here, it can't find the cell that it was referring to, it's
gone. And so it gives us a ref error for reference, basically. So how do you fix that? Well, you can either undo, you can
realize that was a mistake, I can just delete this data. Or if you really have to delete the data, that's okay, but just going to
your formula by clicking on the cell with the ref, err, and you can double click on it and make the changes right there in the
cell. Or you can just click once and then go up here to the formula bar, whichever way you want to do it, you need to go in
and fix the formula. So this is where the error is, I can just delete that and say, okay, see three, multiplied by d3, tap, enter,
that fixed the reference. Now the references are valid, and it's good. Now let's move on to the value error. And you'll get the
value error when you use the wrong function argument. Or often what it is, is you're trying to combine different types of
data that really don't go together. So like a number plus a text, or maybe you're multiplying a word by a number, that won't
make sense in most cases. So let's look at our first example of mistakes that might lead to the value error. Let's say over
here on the right, I'm trying to multiply the number of packages by the quantity per package like I did here successfully. But
let's say instead of C two, what if I were to put b two. So now I'm multiplying the third-floor closet by six. Let's see how
that goes. I tap Enter, and I get the value error. Why? Because I'm combining two types of data that just don't go together
text multiplied by a number value. Another example that's kind of common is let's say, as I'm typing in the number 11, what
if I'm in a hurry, and I accidentally put a space in there, it still looks pretty good. It looks like 11 to me, but I tap Enter on
the keyboard and I get a value error, that extra space just doesn't compute as a number. Another example down here, let's
say again, I'm in a hurry. And as I'm typing in the number 30, maybe I accidentally type in three, oh, instead of three, zero,
let's say all caps is on and that looks like 30. But I tap Enter. Again, I'm combining things that just don't go together three,
oh, multiplied by four, that doesn't make any sense. And so I get a value error. Another fairly common mistake that will
lead to the value error is sometimes when you put symbols in a cell with numbers, Excel doesn't like that sometimes, and
you'll get a value error. Now watch what happens if I put $1 sign in there. Normally, you wouldn't do that, you wouldn't just
put $1 Sign In. Instead, you would select the cell and go up here on the Home ribbon in the Number group and click on
dollar sign. That's the proper way to show that these are dollars. But from time to time, people will just go ahead and type
$1 sign now that actually works. It doesn't cause an error. But other symbols often do cause errors. For example, let's say I
put a hashtag in there. So hashtag 28, maybe I'm trying to say number 28. But I tap Enter on the keyboard and I get a value
error. So watch out whenever you're putting in symbols like these, and you're putting numbers also in the same cell that will
often lead to a value error. So, when you get these value errors, take notice of what is in the cells and if there's mistakes,
you need to fix them. Obviously, I can go in and change it from B to two c two, that'll fix that one. In this case, I can fix the
oh and change it to zero. And in this case, I can get rid of the symbols. Now some of you may be noticing that my formulas
are all messed up a little bit. That's because of my previous example of the ref error and how I deleted to sell notice that it
moved everything up. And that's why my formulas are a little bit off. But the point remains that if you try to combine
different types of data together in formulas, if they don't go together, you will probably get the value error. Thanks for
watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please like follow and subscribe. And when you subscribe,
click the bell so you'll be notified whenever I post another video. And if you'd like to support my channel, become a supporter
of mine through my Patreon account, and you'll see a link to that in the description below.
 HOW TO IMPORT TEXT FILE INTO EXCEL ( 4 Examples, including Tab & CSV Files)

In this video, we want to see how to import a txt file into Excel. Often, we get data that has the extension dot txt that means
this is a txt file. If we open it and look at it field names are in the first row records in subsequent rows, and the delimiter,
which just means what separates the bits of data the delimiter for us is a tab if our goal is to import the text data into our
Excel worksheet, and we're using Excel 2013 or earlier we go to Get External Data from text, we select our file and click
Import. This is the classic Text Import Wizard. It knows we have a delimiter Be sure and check my data has headers, we
click next, it knows that we have a tab delimiter. And down below we can see the different columns and how the data has
been separated. Next, when we select the column data format, General, it'll interpret dates, numbers and text correctly. Click
Finish, then click OK. And our data is imported into our Excel worksheet. If we're in Excel 2016 or later, we go to the get
and transform data group in the data ribbon tab, which is Power Query. Then we go from text CSV, we find our file and
click Import. It wants to know what the delimiter is it guessed right, we come down to load too. And it's going to load as an
Excel table which of course has dynamic ranges existing. Click OK. Now over here in queries and connections, we can see
that 5000 rows have been loaded using Power Query. Over here in connections, we can see this file was loaded using the
Text Import Wizard. If either one of these text file changes, you can right click down to refresh over here. Even though it
doesn't look like it's connected anywhere we can right click refresh. Now is a text file bonus. If we don't have tab as a
delimiter, but a comma, then when we click from text, we see something like this, click Import. And there it is it picked up
that this is a comma, load to click OK, bonus number two, what if you have a modern version of Excel and you don't want
to import it as a table? You want to use the legacy three step wizard to just dump it us and data. Well guess what? Under
get data. There's the legacy wizards and the way you add this option is under File, Options, data. And look at that. I happen
to really like the web legacy version. You can check whichever ones you like. Alright, that was a little fun with importing
text files into Excel. If you want to learn more about loading data with Power Query, check out this video.