The text trap: If you select numbers and the status bar stays blank (or only shows the Count), your numbers are formatted as text—and Excel can't sum words! This tells you that you should click the ...

If you decide to spill the results, you can then use the spilled range operator (#) to perform a calculation on the spilled ...

Have you ever grouped data in Excel only to find your months sorted alphabetically instead of chronologically? It’s a frustrating quirk of the GROUPBY function, one that can turn a clean dataset into ...

Apple's Numbers spreadsheet for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, is not as powerful as Microsoft Excel, but most users will be hard-pressed to find its limitations — and will immediately see how much easier ...

Sorting by date in Excel helps organize your data so you can easily view it in chronological order. Whether you are tracking sales, project timelines, or personal records, sorting by date can make ...

Doug Wintemute is a staff writer for Forbes Advisor. After completing his master’s in English at York University, he began his writing career in the higher education space. Over the past decade, Doug ...

Have you ever struggled to sort data in Excel in a way that truly fits your needs? Imagine trying to organize a list of regions not alphabetically, but in a specific order like “North, South, East, ...

Back in 1980, the Golden State adopted a new numbering scheme for its passenger-car license plates: A number followed by three letters followed by three numbers, i.e. "1AAA000." Given new car sales at ...

Everyone on the planet has heard of Microsoft Excel. It’s the world’s analytical infrastructure. Estimates are that 1,500,000,000 people use Excel. Users love it at least twice a day and typically ...