In addition to the preset options available for formatting dates in Excel, for specific use cases, additional custom date formats can also be created (coded). All rules for the creation of custom number formats apply. Custom date formats are created and stored only in the active workbook, and they affect only the way a number is displayed and do not affect the underlying value of the number. Pre-defined formats for date and time in Excel are available under the …
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Format Numbers as Thousands, Millions, or Billions in Excel
You will sometimes need to report some of your figures in thousands, millions, or billions. This is typically accomplished by dividing the original figures by thousands, millions, or billions, and can be time and/or resource consuming process. However, Excel also offers an alternative in custom number formats. In Excel, numbers can be formatted to be shown as thousands, millions, or billions without any sort of calculations or modifications to the underlying numbers. Custom number formats are created (modified from …
Custom Number Formats in Excel
In addition to the preset options available for formatting numbers in Excel (decimal number, currency, percentage, date, etc.), for specific use cases, additional custom number formats can also be created (coded). Custom number formats are created and stored in the active workbook and are not available to outside workbooks. As with other formatting options, (custom) number formats affect only the way a number is displayed and do not affect the underlying value of the number. Consider the accounting number …
ROW & COLUMN functions
In Excel, there are specific use cases where an exact row (column) number, or an exact number of rows (columns), are necessary for calculations. The ROW function returns the row number of a reference. The ROW function syntax is as follows: = ROW ( reference ) If reference is omitted, the number of the row in which the formula appears is returned. The COLUMN function returns the column number of a reference. The COLUMN function syntax is as …
Generate a random date and/or time
Generating random dates and/or timestamps in Excel is the same as generating any other random number. Keep in mind that no matter how dates and/or timestamps are formatted and possibly edited, the underlying values saved in cells are decimal numbers. Number 1, formatted as a date, will represent January 1, 1900. 44.916 will represent December 21, 2022. 44.916,888111 will be representing December 21, 2022, at 9:18 PM. Date and/or time stamps should be generated between two dates (within a …
Invisible Numbers with Conditional Formatting
You will sometimes need to make some of your numbers appear invisible. In this text we will show how to accomplish this goal using a custom number format, as we want to avoid the commonly used white font color and other problematic methods of accomplishing this goal. Consider the following example: This is a table that will be linked into a PowerPoint presentation, and the gridlines are not shown. Multiple cells contain zeros. We want those to appear invisible …
Excel Tables
What are Excel Tables? Excel Tables, or just Tables, are tables superimposed over regular cells. Excel Tables are assumed to be containing structured data. Both tables and individual table columns are named and intended to be referenced in formulas by those names. As they are typically used to load structured data from an external source into Excel, and that external data is typically accessed from Excel using the Data ribbon and then loaded into Table, they are also sometimes called …
Unbreakable links in Excel
Links, i.e., external references, are used in order to retrieve data from an external source, usually another workbook. Only retrieved values and addresses for those values will be saved in the current workbook. Addresses are saved in order to enable updates, i.e., when the source changes, or the source is changed, so does the current workbook. However, if we want to disable future updates to the current workbook, or if we want to forward our workbook to an external user …
Cleaning up text in Excel: CLEAN, TRIM, and SUBSTITUTE
In Excel, you will occasionally deal with text fields containing line breaks, multiple spaces, hyphenation, currency and letterlike symbols, etc. This is common when dealing with unrestricted user-inputted data and can cause issues. In particular, these kinds of values will be hard to connect with related values without cleanup. When we MATCH those values with related data tables, errors are bound to occur. Basic cleanup approaches include manual replacement of all of the unnecessary characters with a desired or …
EOMONTH function: calculate past or future date from the starting date
You will sometimes need to calculate one date based on another date. Most often, you will need the first or last date of the current month, the first or last date of the current year, the previous or future month, year, quarter dates, etc. No matter what kind of dates you need, the simplest way to generate them will include the EOMONTH function. The EOMONTH function returns the last day of the month in relation to the start date. …