Tag Archives: microsoft excel

Today’s topic is custom number formats.

Custom number formatting allows you to take control of how your data is displayed.

Showing all the cool things you can do with custom number formatting is a huge topic that is outside the scope of this blog. Therefore, I will be sharing just one of the numerous things you could do with custom number formatting.

Let’s jump straight into the example:

Pretend you are working for “Company Awesome” which expects total sales across its four stores to be $2 million. The percentage sales for each store have already been estimated, you just need to create a table to show these numbers. Here is how you could do it:

Today’s topic is Goal Seek.

Goal Seek is a very handy tool to use when you know what you want the result to be, but you don’t know what inputs will get you to that result.

To illustrate this, pretend you want to buy some shares of General Electric (GE) today and then sell the shares sometime in the future for a profit of $100. Using goal seek you can determine how high the stock would have to rise in order to meet your investment criteria. First, start by setting up a simple table with the buy and sell events modeled:

Welcome to the “Excel Tip of the Week” blog. Here you will find weekly articles with tips, tricks, and shortcuts in Excel. Whether you are a prospective student, current student, or alumnus you could always learn more about Excel. In case you missed it, here is the first post with some important information about the blog.

Today’s topic is gridlines.

Gridlines are distracting and ugly. Plus, when you want to copy and paste something from Excel into Word or PowerPoint they show up and look ugly some more. There are a few instances where it is preferable to have the gridlines on, but for the majority of my time in Excel, I get rid of them. Here is how you can get rid of them too: