From the monthly archives:

February 2008

Debugging Excel Formulas

February 29, 2008

It can sometimes be difficult to make sense of complex Excel formulas, especially if you’re not familiar with the functions being used.
One great way to see what’s happening is to evaluate a portion of the formula at a time to determine why Excel is giving you the results that it is. To do this make [...]

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Excel’s Formula Auditing Mode

February 26, 2008

If you’re trying to figure out where your complicated Excel model might be going off-track, or perhaps you’ve inherited someone else’s work and you just want to see the formulas used at a glance, use the Formula Auditing mode to help review the sheet.
Pressing Ctrl-` will toggle between displaying formulas and values in the sheet [...]

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Excel’s Conditional Formatting

February 25, 2008

Excel’s conditional formatting is much more useful than it initially seems to be. You don’t need to base the formatting you set upon the value of the cell you’re formatting; you can format one cell based on the value of a different cell.
In fact, you can base the formatting on formulas and not just on [...]

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Monarch v9 is available in French.

February 21, 2008

C’est magnifique! Monarch v9 est maintenant disponible en français!
For Anglophone readers: Great news! Monarch v9 is now available in French!
Excel with Monarch readers in France, Belgium, Switzerland, parts of Canada and many other places around the world can now take advantage of the power of Monarch in what is likely their preferred language.
I often refer [...]

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Use Monarch’s Tree to Speed Navigation

February 20, 2008

The Tree feature available in Monarch’s report window is often overlooked.
Once your model is applied, you can often find navigate to a specific region in a large report file by using the Tree more quickly than searching with the Find feature.

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Get Free Monarch Software

February 19, 2008

Today I discovered that you can download a free copy of Monarch, albeit a limited evaluation of an older version of the program. Specifically, it’s the Standard edition of version 5. Coincidentally, this is the version that I first used.
If you don’t already have Monarch, this is a great opportunity to try it out for [...]

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Include a Summary for Reports with Totals

February 18, 2008

When modeling a report that includes grand totals, always take an extra minute or two to build a summary that totals all of your extracted values to ensure that you’ve modeled the data as accurately as you think you have. You’ll be happy to see that the totals balance to the report.
But you’ll be thrilled [...]

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