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Excel Tips From the Excel Guru November 2005 Despite the large selection of accounting software programs for businesses, Microsoft Excel is the tried-and-true spreadsheet option for most, especially for small businesses. A new book by Bob Umlas, a Microsoft Excel MVP and author of 300 articles on Excel, shares several tips on how to get the most out of the software. This Isn't Excel, It's Magic! is a concise and visual 144-page book with 85 tips and tricks, and is reasonably priced at $19.95. Below you'll find two excerpts from the book: one on Filling Holes, and the other on Unique Entries. Filling Holes Suppose you have a worksheet like this:
Well, there's a pretty easy way:
1. Select cells, use Edit/Goto Special, select Blanks:
2. Type "=", press the up-arrow, then press Ctrl/Enter:
What? It can't be that easy! What happened? Look at cell B3: It says =B2, or the cell above. Ctrl-enter says "fill the selected cells with the formula", so every blank cell references the cell above. So A12 says =A11, etc. Now the sort is trivial. And if you want to clear the formulas, simply select 1 cell, use Edit/Goto Special, select Formulas & OK, then press the delete key to produce the sorted result.
Allow Only Unique Entries in a Column Use Data/Validation with a custom formula like =COUNTIF(B:B.B1)=1:
Let's enter 1 in cell B7 and see what happens:
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