VLOOKUP is a super-useful Microsoft Excel function. It allows you to bring in data from another sheet related to the data you are entering. It speeds up data entry while also cutting down on errors.

This is fine if your master list is fixed, but the problem is the sheet you are drawing from might be growing or shrinking.

Take this example where we have a list of products. This sheet contains all the products we stock so that in another sheet when we enter a product ID we can draw in the Product Name and Price automagically.

If these are the only products we will ever stock, or if the catalogue only grows very occasionally, then that is ok. We can edit the sheets and formulas as and when required. But what if we are adding new products often?

Thankfully there is a smart way that we can still use VLOOKUP but with a dynamic range. How do we do that? Read on…

VLOOKUP with Named Ranges

Ordinarily when we use VLOOKUP we specify a precise range, such as =VLOOKUP(A2,A2:C10,3) where the range is from A2 to C10. Obviously if we were to add a new product we would need to make it C11 and so on, every time our product list changed.

The first step in simplifying this is to instead use a “named range”. So rather than A2:C10 we would use the name “product”.

Select the area of cells that you wish to name and click Define Name in the Name Manager.

Then supply the name you wish to use, checking that the range is correct.

This approach now transforms our VLOOKUP to look like VLOOKUP(A2,Product,3) etc. Changing the range then would be simply done centrally in the Name Manager.

Dynamic Named Ranges

We don’t want to have to keep going into Name Manager though. Ideally we want it to “self correct” and just work. The good news is a solution does exist.

When we create the named range, instead of a straight forward range, instead we use a formula.

=OFFSET(‘Product List’!$A$1,1,0,COUNTA(‘Product List’!$A:$A)-1,3)
The OFFSET function asks for a row count, but we can even dynamically supply this by using the COUNTA function. Any time we add products this count will increase, giving us our dynamic range.

Summary

A standard VLOOKUP is a great way to speed up your data entry but requires you to edit your formulas or at least the named ranges. Making your named ranges dynamic by using a formula to select the range allows you to focus purely on the data entry, leaving Excel to worry about where your lookups are pointing.

About the author: Yoav Ezer co-authors the technology and productivity blog Codswallop. He is also the CEO of a company that produces PDF to Excel conversion software. For more Excel tips from Yoav, join him on Facebook or Twitter

How to Use the Excel VLOOKUP Function for a Range of Unknown Size originally published on Ampercent

But not when I am surfing on a public computer, or using the shared computer of a friend or using an unprotected Wi -Fi connection.

If you are like me and never use your email and Google Docs credentials on a public computer, try Zoho’s Online document viewer and converter.

ZohoViewer: Online Document Viewer And Converter

Zoho Viewer lets you upload and publish Office documents online, without having to register for any account. The published documents are not private and you may define an age of up to 1 year, after which the documents will be automatically deleted from Zoho’s servers ( the other options being 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months and so on).

When you are done uploading the document(s), Zoho opens the document in your browser so that you can read it, share it, print it and do other productive things.

Zoho Viewer also provides a neat short URL for the uploaded document and also allows you to embed the document in any HTML webpage. Should you need to convert the uploaded document to any of it’s sister format, simply click through the “Export” link and choose the output format of the published document.

For example: You may want to convert a Word document to Open document text or to RTF format. There is no need to download any document converter, just use Zoho Viewer and convert office documents to compatible formats.

The only thing missing in Zoho Viewer is the ability to password protect any uploaded document so that anyone who has the link is unable to edit it or permanently delete it from Zoho’s server’s. But considering all the other features of Zoho’s online document viewer and converter, I think it outperforms Google Docs, Docs.com, Windows Live Skydrive and other office online suites.

Note: A similar website is Zamzar.com which works with Mp3′s, Videos, Ebook’s, PDF’s as well as Zipped archives.

Do you know any better online document converter that does not require any registrations, is ad free and provides sharing and embedding facilities? Shoot your ideas and links in the comments below.

Related: Convert PDF documents to PowerPoint presentations

ZohoViewer Lets You View And Convert Office Documents Without Any Signups originally published on Ampercent

In this short tutorial, we will learn how you can remove duplicate entries in an excel column or row, using a simple data filter.

Remove Duplicate Data In an Excel Row Or Column

1. Open the Excel spreadsheet and highlight the row or column whose values you want to check. You have to click the top of the column in order to select the entire column; should you want to select only specific cells, simply drag the mouse cursor to create a selection.

2. When you are done selecting the cells from which the duplicate entries are to be removed, highlight the “Data” tab, as shown below:

3.  Now hit the “Remove Duplicates” button and Excel will automatically delete all the duplicate entries from your selection.

Microsoft Office will further show you a confirmation message like this:

The above message is shown when Excel finds that there are 3 instances of the same data spread across different cells. Among the 3 instances of the repeating data, Excel will remove 2 duplicate entries while keeping only one instance of the data in the selected row or column.

The above trick works for as many duplicate sets you might have in a specific cell or column. If you want to scan the entire spreadsheet for duplicate values, hit “Control + A”, switch to the “Data” tab and select “Remove Duplicate Entries”.

Highlighting Duplicate Values And Manually Deleting Them Using Conditional Formatting

There may be situations when you might want to manually delete the duplicate entries one by one. The question is: How do you highlight the duplicate values in an excel row or column ? How can we easily sort the duplicate entries and then check each of them one by one ?

This can be easily achieved using Excel conditional formatting, as described below:

1. Select the row or column where you want to filter the duplicate entries. If you want to select the entire spreadsheet, hit “Control + A”

2. Switch to the “Home” tab and click “Conditional formatting >Highlight cell rules > Equal to”

3. Next, enter the exact value which you want to filter or highlight in the chosen row. If you are not sure regarding the duplicates values that are to be filtered out, first run a “Duplicate value” check as described earlier in the article.

4. As soon as you enter the value in the conditional formatting window, Excel will automatically highlight the redundant entries. Now you can manually remove them in any order of your choice.

Remove Duplicate Values From A Google Docs Spreadsheet

If you are like me and use Google Docs spreadsheets a lot for managing accounts, drawing charts – you might want to learn how to remove duplicate values from a Google Docs spreadsheet.

Google Docs does not supports filtering values using Logical functions, but you can still borrow some help from Excel’s conditional formatting. What this means is that you can apply conditional formatting in a Google Docs spreadsheet and filter duplicate values in any row or column.

1. Select the entire row or column where you want to filter the duplicate values. You may also select specific cells using a manual selection (dragging).

2. Click the small arrow icon over the column, as shown below:

3.  This will open the conditional formatting window where you can add multiple rules for that particular row or column.

4. To highlight all the duplicate values in the selected row or column, choose “Is equal to” and then enter the value and choose a background.

5. Save your rule and voila ! Google Docs will now highlight all the duplicate entries in the chosen row or column.

Unfortunately, there is no automatic way to delete all the duplicate entries in one shot. However, you can use Google Doc’s conditional formatting to highlight the redundant entries and then manually delete the duplicates.

These are two simplest ways to find duplicate entries in Excel spreadsheet, you may write your own Excel functions to remove duplicate values from a spreadsheet depending upon your requirements or rules.

Know any excel tip which you want to share with fellow readers? Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

More tips on Microsoft Excel:

1. Use Macros to detect the formatting properties of a cell
2. Open Excel spreadsheets without Excel

Remove Duplicate Values In An Excel Spreadeet Using Filters And Conditional Formatting originally published on Ampercent

Have you ever wanted to write a macro that interacts with your spreadsheets formatting rather than the actual values? Perhaps automatically change font, borders or colors decided by your programming logic.

Let’s work on an example.

When you enter values into a cell, you may have seen that the text flows into neighboring cells. Of course you can reformat the cell, stretch it, or turn on wrapping, but what if you could automatically resize the font of an Excel cell so it always fits?

Here is a clever macro script that resizes a cell’s contents on demand and demonstrates how you can programmatically apply formatting based on macros rules.

If you type into a cell then hit the keyboard combination specified (in this case Ctrl-W), the font is automatically altered to ensure the text fits.

The properties we are working with here are simple: the font.size, the text alignment; .HorizontalAlignment and .VerticalAlignment, but there are many others to check out.

In the macro options we set the keyboard combination in the usual way:

The Macro

How it works is the height of the active cell is checked against a variable we created called “RowElement”. If the height is different, we left align and vertically center the contents of the cell. The macro then checks to see if the height is less than or equal to 30 and proceeds to set the font size to the height minus 4 and set the RowElement to this value plus 1.

If the height is greater than 30 then the size is set to the height + 10.

Summary

You might wonder how often this macro would be used on a day to day basis but it does demonstrate how you can use macros to detect the formatting properties of cells and elements, and apply formatting automatically based on those results.

How might you apply this functionality to your work?

About the author : Yoav Ezer co-authors the technology and productivity blog Codswallop. He is also the CEO of a company that produces PDF to Excel conversion software. For more Excel tips from Yoav, join him on Facebook or Twitter

Yoav has contributed a couple of more Excel tips to this site, you can click through the following links and read Yoav’s earlier articles:

1. Advanced Excel If Formulas and Functions
2. How to Work with Date Functions in Excel spreadsheet
3. How to create PowerPoint charts from an Excel Data set.

Use Macros To Detect The Formatting Properties Of A Cell In An Excel Spreadsheet originally published on Ampercent

Apart from storing regular files, Skydrive has a very good document processor which allows you to create Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations directly from the browser. These documents are stored in your Live Skydrive account and can be shared with anyone, apart from allowing other collaborative features (just like Google Docs).

If you want to create or edit documents stored in Windows Live Skydrive account directly from Microsoft Office, here is a free office add-in which will help.

Office Live Files lets you sign in to your Skydrive account directly from Microsoft office. After the add-in is installed, switch to the “Office Live Files” tab and sign in with your Windows live account. You would then be able to browse to any Skydrive folder and upload any file, not just office documents. (see example)

The impressive part regarding the add-in is that you can load any document from Skydrive, directly in the Microsoft Office interface. Then the document can be edited as usual. When you are done editing the document, the changes will be synced to the document that’s stored in your Live Skydrive account. Impressive !

Note: You will see a warning message e.g “This file originated from an internet location and might be unsafe”. Ignore the message and hit “Enable Editing” to start editing the document.

The advantage of using Office Live add-in is that you don’t have to fire up a web browser, just to edit a document from your Skydrive account. You can edit any Live Skydrive document directly from desktop.

Office Live add-in Works with Office 2007, office 2010 and earlier versions of Microsoft Office. Give it a try !

Tip: If you are a Google Docs fan, check out our earlier tutorial on creating and editing Google Docs documents from Microsoft Office

[ via ]

Create Or Edit Windows Live Skydrive Documents From Microsoft Office originally published on Ampercent

But creating 3D charts in PowerPoint and beautifying them takes a lot of time. Novice users either don’t have the expertise or lack the time needed to create a chart in PowerPoint.

Then there are some web based tools which allows you to create pie charts, ven diagrams or bar graphs but the problem with these tools is the data associated with the chart. When you want to modify the chart at a later point of time, you have to start all over from scratch, which can be very time consuming. Google Docs is a good alternative as far as organizing the data of the chart is concerned, but you are not able to create animated or 3D charts in Google Docs presentations.

That’s where oomfo fits in perfectly. It’s a free add-in for Microsoft Powerpoint which allows you to create beautiful single series, multi series, combination and stacked charts in no time. Once the add-in is installed, you can follow a simple wizard and add the chart to any of your presentation slides.

The default charting tool of PowerPoint is Microsoft Graph which creates charts in bitmap image formats. Unlike this, oomfo charts uses your computers flash player to create animated or 3D charts for PowerPoint. Using oomfo, you can also define how the charts are animated, choose different themes and also export data from an excel spreadsheet.

To see oomfo in action, watch the video demonstration below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyL7wH7jC7Q

oomfo supports PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2007 and the latest Powerpoint 2010. Thanks Kaushik

Related: Create PowerPoint charts from an Excel data set

Create 3D Animated Charts In PowerPoint With Oomfo originally published on Ampercent

The idea is something like this – create a new spreadsheet and store it in the public folder of your skydrive account. Then copy and paste a simple HTML code and the spreadsheet is embedded in your website. The advantage of using Windows live skydrive is that if you change the content or data of any of the cells later, the change will be automatically reflected in the spreadsheet, embedded in your website.

Following are the steps involved to embed an excel spreadsheet in an HTML webpage:

1. Sign in to http://office.live.com with your Windows live ID

2. Go to the public folder and upload the spreadsheet(s).

3. Open the workbook for editing and click the “Share” dropdown. Then choose “Embed” as shown below:

4. Done !

Here is an example spreadsheet embedded using office Live skydrive

The same is also true for Word documents or PowerPoint presentations but Scribd and Slideshare are strong alternatives for embedding PowerPoint presentations or Word documents in a webpage, so there is no need to use Office Skydrive for the same.

How to Embed a Google Docs Spreadsheet in a Webpage

Embedding a Google Docs spreadsheet is also easily achieved, though the output of Wndows live skydrive is much better. Following are the steps involved:

1. Open the Google Docs spreadsheet in a browser, click “Share” and click “Publish as a webpage”

2. Then copy the public link of the Google Docs spreadsheet as shown below:

3. Use the following code to embed the spreadsheet in any HTML webpage:

Here is the same spreadsheet embedded using Google Docs:

Tip: How to copy paste HTML tables from a webpage and embed them in a document.

How to Embed An Excel SpreadSheet In a Webpage originally published on Ampercent

Microsoft Word makes it very easy to print multiple documents from Windows explorer menu. Surprisingly, you don’t need to open all the documents but can print them all at once. This is perfect when you have a large number of documents to consider and want a quick way to print documents in bulk.

Print Multiple Word Documents From Right Click Context Menu

Follow these simple steps:

1. First adjust your printers settings by printing a sample document and see whether the margins and layout are all correct. Do not ignore this step because if the print settings are not at par with your requirements, all the ink and paper will be wasted.

2. Move all the documents to a single folder and open that folder.

3. If the files are consecutive,  hold down the shift key and select the first and last file. This will select all the files in the order you want them to print. If you want to print selected files only, hold down Ctrl key and select the files you want to print.

For example: Let’s say you have 10 documents with file names 1.doc, 2.doc and so on. If you want to print all the documents serially, hold down the Shift key and select 1.doc and 10.doc ( i.e the first and last file in the series of documents that are going to be printed).

Instead, if you want to print only 5.doc and 9.doc, hold down the Control keyon your keyboard and follow the next steps.

4. Right click and select “Print” from right click context menu. Windows will now print all the documents one by one in the order you have selected them using the default print settings.

Tip: Don’t try to print multiple documents when any of the document is open in Microsoft Word. First close all the documents and then use the above trick.

The above technique works with any office document, not just word. This is quite handy when you have a large number of documents to print and you don’t want to open each document and manually print them one by one.

Also read: Tips to reduce printing costs

Save Or Print Word Documents Into A PDF File

In some situations, you may want to print the word document as a PDF and not on paper. Let’s say you are working on a report and want to send the final copy to a client for verification purpose.

It makes perfect sense to first send a PDF copy of the Word document to the client, see his response, make corrections to the original document if it is asked for and then print the hard copy of the report on paper.

Microsoft Word makes it very easy to print a word document as PDF. In case you are unaware of the “Print as PDF” feature, here are the steps which needs to be followed:

1. Go to Microsoft Download Center website and download the “Save as PDF or XPS‘ office Add-in.

The “Save as PDF” add-in for Microsoft Office 2007 allows you to export and save Word documents as PDF, there is no need to use expensive PDF editing software programs like Adobe Acrobat, Foxit Reader and so on.

2. After the program has been installed, open the document in Microsoft Word and you will see a new ‘Print as PDF’ option, as shown below:

3. Export the doc or docx file as PDF and you are done.

Combine Multiple Word Documents Into A PDF File And Print Them In Bulk

Another good idea to print multiple files or office documents would be to combine all of them into a single document and print the newly created document from the first page to the last. The advantage is that this technique works on all operating systems e.g Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 and you need not worry about whether a specific page of a specific file will be printed or not.

Here are the steps that needs to be followed:

1. First create a backup of all the documents, in case you want to revert the changes later.

2. Open the first document in the list and move the cursor to the end of the document. You will be adding the content of the second document at the end of the first document, hence the cursor needs to be positioned right at the place where the content of the first document finishes.

3. In case you want to insert a document somewhere in the middle of the already opened document, you have to position the cursor at the desired location.

4. Once you are done with the position, switch to the “Insert” tab and select “Insert text from file”.

5. This will allow you to merge multiple word documents into a single document by pulling in the text and content of another document into the current one.

6. Similarly, add up text and content from all the documents into the currently opened document using the ‘Insert text from file” option. The only catch is that Microsof Word wont preserve the formatting of individual documents, so you will need to adjust the formatting at the end.

7. When you are done adding all the documents to the final copy, there are two options

• Either, print all the content using the simple “Print” option in word. This will print all the subpages which you have imported from other documents earlier on.
• Export the final copy as a PDF file, preview it and then print using the default “Print’ option in Adobe Reader ( or whatever PDF reading software you’re using the browse PDF files).

These are just a couple of ways to manage the print jobs of multiple documents in one go. You may also want to check out Google Docs cloud print feature which allows you to send print jobs to your cloud connected printer directly from a mobile device. This is especially useful, when you’re travelling and want to print a whole bunch of documents stored in your Google Docs account.

A slightly complicated procedure would be to sync Google Docs documents with Microsoft office and use Google’s cloud print feature to print multiple documents from anywhere, any computer.

Print Multiple Word Documents Without Opening Them originally published on Ampercent

Steps To Type New Indian Rupee Symbol :

1. Download the Rupee Foradian Font from the Mangalore based Foradian Technologies Pvt Ltd blog. Copy the .ttf file after downloading.

2. Open [Windows Drive Letter]:\Windows\Fonts and paste the font there. It will be installed on your PC.

3. Once done, open your MS Word (or any text editing tool that lets you change the font of the text) and type “`” on your keyboard. It is the leftmost key in the number row (not Numpad) i.e just to the left of “1” or just above the Tab key.

4. Select the text (`) and change the font to Rupee Foradian. Bang and the new Indian rupee symbol is there.

If you are still facing some problems doing it just visit Youtube and watch this video tutorial.

How To Type The New Indian Rupee Symbol in MS Word originally published on Ampercent

The IF() function is one of Excel’s super functions. It is a fundamental building-block of Excel formulas. You will find it present in almost any complex formula. There is a lot more power in Excel formulas conditions than just the basic IF() function, though.

Here are 7 conditional techniques that can help you create even more robust and useful Excel formulas:

1. Nested If Functions

This is the most basic type of ‘complex’ if() function. You can use an additional if function to create a more complex condition within your Excel formula.

For instance:

=IF(A1>10,IF(A1<20,"In range"))

The function above would test whether cell A1 contains a value that’s between 10 and 20. Only if both conditions are satisfied then the formula returns the value “In range”.

It is possible to use several levels of IF() function nesting. For example:

=IF(A1>10,IF(A1<20,IF(B2="HAS AMMO","FIRE!!!!")))

The formula above tests that A1 contains a number that is within range and that B2 holds the status ‘HAS AMMO’ and only if those three conditions are satisfied, it returns a value of “FIRE!”.

2. Logical-Boolean Functions

Nesting is powerful but it is complicated and often results in a formula that is difficult to read or change. A much better way to create complex conditions is to use Excel’s Boolean functions.

The AND() function will return true if all its parameters are true conditions.

So, the formula…

=IF(AND(A1>10,A1<20), "In range")

Will also check if cell A1 is between 10 and 20 pluse, it is much easier to understand (and to write) then the nested formula above.

The following formula…

=IF(AND(A1>10,A2<20,B1="HAS AMMO"),"FIRE!")

Is ten times easier to write/read then the corresponding nested IF() above

Another extremely useful Boolean function is the OR() function.

The formula…

=IF(OR(A1="CAT IS AWAY",A1="CAT IS BUSY"),"THE MICE PLAY")

Will return ‘THE MICE PLAY’ if A1 equals either ‘cat is away’ or ‘cat is busy’.

3. Countif, SumIf, Averageif, etc.

This group of functions allows you to apply a range function such as SUM(), COUNT() OR AVERAGE() only to rows that meet a specific condition.

For instance, you can sum or count all the sales that were made during the year 2001 as shown below:

It goes without saying that these conditional functions are very useful.

4. Countifs, SumIfs, Averageifs, etc.

The COUNTIFS() and SUMIFS() function (and the rest of the multiple conditions aggregate functions) were introduced in Excel 2007.

These functions enable us to apply an aggregation function to a subset of rows where those rows meet several conditions.

For instance, we can use the SUMIFS() function to sum all the sales that were made in the January of 2001, with a single function…

5. If and Array Formulas

Array formulas might be the most advanced of the formula techniques and while we can’t hope to cover the topic of array formulas in this article, it is important to mention that combining the IF() function with array formulas is a powerful tool.

In Excel versions prior to 2007, the formula AVERAGEIF() did not exist. So, if for example, you wished to average a range of numbers without including Zeros in the calculation, you needed to rely on an array formula:

Array formulas can also be used to mimic the working of countifs(), sumifs() and the rest of the xxxxxifs() functions, that simply did not exist in Excel versions before 2007.

They can also be used to implement new functions that does not exist such as MAXIF() and MINIF().

For a more in depth discussion of array formulas, look here.

6. IFError() function

A close relative of the IF() function is the IFERROR() function. It allows you return a valid value in case a formula returns an error. For instance, if you have a formula that might cause a division by zero error, you can use the IFERROR() function to catch this event and return a valid value, as shown below:

Note: It is better to use the IF() function to avoid an error then to use the ISERROR() function to catch an error. It is both faster (in terms of CPU) and better programming practice. So the same result we achieved with the ISERROR() function above can be achieved with an IF() function as shown here:

But there are cases when you cannot pretest the formula parameters and in those cases the ISERROR() function can come in handy.

7. Information functions

Distant relatives of the IF() function are the information functions. This group includes several functions that give you information about the type of the value contained in a cell (if it’s a string, a number, an odd number or an even number), if a cell is empty or if it contains an N/A value and more.

These functions, when used in conjunction with the IF() function can be pretty handy, for example, they allow you to easily check whether a cell is empty:

Summary

Our examples in this article only scratch the surface, we would encourage you to experiment more into what you can do. These seven simple functions hide a great deal of power and utility.

They are the building blocks of some very useful macros. We hope we have inspired you to put them to use in your own projects!

More Excel tips:

1. How to work with Date functions in Excel
2. Create an Interactive Timeline with Microsoft Excel

Yoav is the CEO of Cogniview, a company that creates PDF to XLS conversion software. Prior to that, Yoav Ezer was the CEO of Nocturnus, a technology-centered software solution company. For more Excel tips from Yoav, join him on Facebook or Twitter.

7 Excel ‘If’ Function Techniques You Need to Know originally published on Ampercent