Consulting

XLG File Tools is a FREE add-in which was created to increase the functionality of Excel and address the plethora of extra clicks that were introduced begining in Excel 2007. It's current feature set is designed to make the job of opening existing files and creating new files more efficient.

XLG File Tools is easy to use, and is guaranteed to make you more efficient. In addition, it's a snap to install and requires no administrative priviledges to do so.
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One of the things that used to drive me crazy about working with PivotTables in PowerPivot’s initial (2008) release was summarizing dates by month. With a standard PivotTable, we can use the built in Group functionality to group dates by Years, Quarters and Months. But in PowerPivot, that functionality wasn't implemented. To deal with this, we have to provide our own date table, but the months never really sorted well, and we had to resort to tricks to coerce them into the right order.
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We use PowerPivot to display key information in dashboards, some of which can be refreshed right up to the current second. Naturally, one of the first questions asked when looking at the reports (particularly if they get printed) is “When was the data last updated?”
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The purpose of the VLOOKUP function is simple: it looks up data in tables and returns results from a different column. So if you have a table of products, for example, you could ask VLOOKUP to return the price for an item given the ID of the product.

But VLOOKUP is more than just that; it is the gateway to real Excel knowledge. The VLOOKUP function contains everything that a function can throw at you: multiple required parameters, optional parameters with defaults, and needs both ranges and numeric data in its input strings. If you can master this function, you can master ANY other function in Excel.
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