Excel – Adding Ordinal Suffixes to a List of Numbers

An ordinal indicator is a character, or group of characters, that follows a number denoting that it is an ordinal number, as opposed to a cardinal number. For English speaking countries, this corresponds to the suffixes -st, -nd, -rd, -th in written ordinals (represented either on the line 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or as superscript, […]

Supercharge Your VLOOKUP Functions in Excel

Any Excel user who considers themselves a “power user” cannot make such a statement with a straight face without knowing how to use VLOOKUP functions. Of all of the ways to retrieve information, the VLOOKUP function is without debate the most popular means of looking up and returning information from an Excel list.  It’s not […]

Apply Two Different Number Formats to a Single Field (Excel Pivot Tables)

There comes a time in every Excel Power User’s life when they must deal with mixed content in a single field.  Examine the following table: The Value field (column E) contains a mixture of sale amounts (values as decimals) and discount rates (percentages.)  If a pivot table is constructed using this data, it can take […]

Automatically Refresh Pivot Tables in Excel

Excel PivotTables are one of the greatest tools in the spreadsheet user’s toolkit. However, there is one tiny bit of functionality that appears to be missing: the ability of pivot tables to automatically update when information in the source data changes. Most user’s see this as a glaring lack of functionality. There is, however a […]