Some of the really cool charts that we can build in Excel involve the trick of combining multiple chart types together to make them happen. In this article, we’ll build one of those; a temperature chart that not only shows the forecasted high and low temperatures, but also the season highs and lows. The beauty of this chart is that it provides a lot of information, some of which essentially fades into the background until you really need it.
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Something that can be very handy when you’re building a dashboard is to return a certain picture depending on a condition. We can use VLOOKUP to look up data in a table and return the corresponding value from a different column, but unfortunately we can’t do that with pictures... or can we?

This example shows how to accomplish the equivlanet of a picture VLOOKUP, and is based on looking up a picture to display the appropriate... read more

Conditional formatting in Excel is a powerful tool that allows you to dynamically format cells depending on the values of that or other cells’ data. In Excel 2007 the conditional formatting engine was re-written, opening things up to allow more than 3 conditional formats on any cell, as well as conditional formats that could overlap ranges. All in all, these were fantastic improvements that can lead to some very versatile and useful worksheets.

Unfortunately, the user interface to control conditional formatting is not the most intuitive. The purpose of this article is to help you understand the way Excel applies rule precedence so that you can build powerful formatting rules of your own, without getting frustrated along the way.
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As an accountant, I build financial reports, and one of the issues that we have to deal with is getting the numbers to display in a friendly format. Because of the way that debits and credits are stored in databases though, this can be a little challenging.

In this article, I’m going to walk through the process of building a simple profit and loss statement with PowerPivot, showing how to make all values show correctly. There are some certain key issues that we’ve got to work through though, and we’ll do that using a conditional DAX measure.
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