Posts Tagged ‘Formulas’

Have you ever wanted to quickly know what cells are impacted on when you change a value of a cell in Excel 2007.

By using the “Trace Dependents” feature, you can very quickly understand exactly the influence a cell has in your spreadsheet.  The best part of this feature is, that you will see big arrows that enable you to visually see the relationship, so you don’t have to decipher formulas and cell names to make sense of it all.

To turn on Trace Dependents:

1) Select the cell you want to see the dependents of

2) Make sure you are on the “Formulas” tab of the ribbon

3) Look for the “Formula Auditing” group (about 3/4 of the way along the ribbon)

4) Click on “Trace Dependents”

Now you will see arrows pointing you in the right direction!

‘till next time!
TNP

Have you ever wanted to quickly know what cells directly impact on the calculated value of a cell in Excel 2007.

By using the “Trace Precedents” feature, you can very quickly understand exactly which cells influence the output of a cell.  The best part of this feature is, that you will see big arrows that enable you to visually see the relationship, so you don’t have to decipher formulas and cell names to make sense of it all.

To turn on Trace Precedents:

1) Select the cell you want to see the precedents of

2) Make sure you are on the “Formulas” tab of the ribbon

3) Look for the “Formula Auditing” group (about 3/4 of the way along the ribbon)

4) Click on “Trace Precedents”

Now you will see arrows pointing you in the right direction!

‘till next time!
TNP

Are you building a spreadsheet and would like to know how many black cells you have in a given range?

There is a great function in Excel that you can use to do exactly that – count the number of BLANK cells in a range.

Simply type…

=COUNTBLANK(range)

(replace range with the range of cells you want to limit your count to). 

Note that there is one particular thing that might slip you up with this function.  When using =COUNTBLANK(), Excel is only searching for blank, empty cells.  If you have a space in a cell for example – it might look empty to you, but Excel can see that there is a space – which means it will not think it is blank, and not count it.

‘till next time!
TNP