Top-5 Advanced Excel Formulas

Microsoft Excel is ubiquitous with businesses and organizations. It maximizes the efficiency of workflow and adds a lot of value to the day-to-day tasks. It provides data processing with very useful built-in tools. These tools are easy to learn and implement for both the professionals and individual users. Microsoft is especially useful for experts because it provides very advanced formulas and features. Excel helps businesses, be it small, medium, or large, keep their data organized and well maintained. Additionally, Excel allows them to analyze data to get essential insights from it. This article lists some of the advanced Excel formulas that would save professional users a lot of time.

1. IS ERROR

It is an advanced formula that helps to diagnose errors in the cells. Sometimes Excel gives errors while applying a formula on a certain cell. On large datasets, this becomes a problem. Is the Error formula identify problems associated with cells so that the error could be removed.

Formula=ISERROR (cell number)

2. CHOOSE

If there are 5 values in a column, this choose formula will let you select one value out of those five values. For example, there are 10 models of PC listed in a column, you could select the 5th entry by replacing ‘selection’ with number ‘5’ in the formula below.

Formula: =CHOOSE (Selection, first option, second option, third option)

3. Index match

It is an advanced formula for search. It looks up the desired value in rows and columns at the same time. For example, a table lists the social security numbers of employees of a company. If an employee name with a particular social security number is required, then the Index match would look for the name in rows and columns.

Formula=INDEX (range, MATCH (search, search range, type of match))

4. TRIM and LEN

LEN and TRIM are very useful for accounting and finance professionals particularly in carrying out financial analytics. The trim formula removes all the extra space in the text. It is an important way to keep the dataset clean and error-free. Similarly, the Len function is used to find the length of text strings. For example, if the cell contains the text “united nations” the LEN output will be equal to 14. This number also includes spaces.

Formula=TRIM (cell number)

Formula=LEN (cell number)

5. OFFSET with nested SUM

The basic functionality of the offset formula returns a value that is a certain number of rows and columns away from a reference value. When the offset formula is combined with sum or average formulas, it can accomplish quite advanced tasks. It is very helpful in creating dynamic functions that are able to add a variable number of cell values using sum formula whereas using sum alone results in the constant calculation of a fixed number of cells. This is done by replacing the last reference value of the sum formula with the offset formula.

Formula: =SUM (reference: OFFSET (vertical offset, horizontal offset, v size, h size))

This formula can also be used as follows:

Formula: =SUM (OFFSET (vertical offset, horizontal offset, v size, h size))

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