How to Smooth Data by Using the TREND Function
Years ago, I read that Prof. William S. Cleveland had suggested that data could be smoothed by calculating a centered trendline through adjacent data—a...
Here’s How Inflation Could Affect the Value of Your Home
November 5, 2021
Inflation is rising in the U.S. And that made me wonder how a higher rate of inflation could affect the price of...
How to Smooth Monthly Trends with Centered Moving Averages
I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the expected increase of electric vehicles in the US. That made me wonder...
How to Foot and Cross-Foot Excel Reports in a Floating-Point World
At first glance, the following report is an ordinary one. It merely sums an Excel Table by Product and Region, and then foots and...
Excel’s XLOOKUP Function Explained
Excel's XLOOKUP function searches a range or an array, and returns an item corresponding to the first match it finds. If a match doesn't...
Excel’s VLOOKUP Function Explained
Excel's VLOOKUP function looks in the first column of an array and moves across the row to return the value of a cell.
VLOOKUP is...
How I Set Up SEARCH and FIND Formulas on Steroids
I've used Excel long enough to recognize when I've stumbled across an unusual formula. And it happened again a few minutes ago.
In the past,...
How to Calculate Inflation in Three Different Ways
Today, in the third quarter of 2021, the business press is churning out an avalanche of articles about the return of inflation. Although some...
A Two-Part Excel Puzzle, with Arrays, Text, ASCII, and Concatenation
Recently, I needed to compare two long columns of text of various lengths to make sure that each row of text in column A...
How to Tame Nested IF Functions in Excel
When I review my Excel formulas from many years ago, one of the types of formulas that I'm most embarrassed about today is the...