How-To Guides

Join text in Excel with the ampersand or TEXTJOIN, skip blank cells, and stop dates and currency turning into plain numbers when you combine them.

Freeze rows and columns in Excel with Freeze Panes, pin both at once, and fix the option when it is greyed out or ends up freezing the wrong rows entirely.

Remove blank rows in Excel safely, avoid the Go To Special trap that deletes partial records, and fix rows that look empty but refuse to delete.

Split cell contents in Excel with Text to Columns, Flash Fill or TEXTSPLIT — without overwriting the column beside it or losing your leading zeros.

Make a graph in Excel, choose the chart type that fits your question, avoid misleading axes and pie charts, and build charts that update themselves.

Sort data in Excel safely, sort by multiple columns and custom orders, and fix sorting that is greyed out or puts numbers in the wrong order.

Add a drop-down list in Excel with Data Validation, make it update itself from a Table, build dependent lists, and fix a dropdown that stopped working.

Use VLOOKUP in Excel with exact match, understand why it only looks right, fix #N/A errors, and know when XLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH is the better choice.

Unhide columns in Excel, reveal column A when the normal method fails, and fix the cases where Unhide does nothing because they were never hidden.

Merge cells in Excel, see what merging breaks in sorting and pivots, and use Center Across Selection for the same look without the problems.