How-To Guides

Apply conditional formatting in Excel, from simple highlight rules to Custom Formula rules, and fix formatting that highlights the wrong cells.

Build a working monthly budget in Excel with Income, Planned vs Actual Expenses, and a live Summary tab — no downloaded template or macros required.

Write IF formulas in Excel step by step, combine IF with AND and OR, and know when nested IFs have gone too far and it’s time to switch to IFS instead.

Build INDEX MATCH formulas in Excel for lookups VLOOKUP can’t handle, including left-lookups and two-way row-and-column lookups in a single formula.

Build an Excel PivotTable from raw data — what the Rows, Columns, Values and Filters boxes do, and how to fix a pivot showing Count instead of Sum.

Use SUMIF in Excel to total matching cells fast, get the three arguments in the right order, and fix the top cause of a SUMIF formula returning 0 wrongly.

Count cells in Excel the right way — COUNT, COUNTA, COUNTBLANK and COUNTIF explained, plus why COUNT returns 0 when your numbers are stored as text.

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.