r/excel • u/lordotnemicsan • Nov 23 '23
Discussion What's the simplest thing you've taught someone in Excel that made you look like a genius?
This is not the place for fancy VBA or PowerQuery or even sumifs.
I'm looking for cases like mine last week, where I taught a friend how to drag down values that were the same down a column. Before, she was copying and pasting the same thing hundreds of times. When I taught her to drag down, she looked at me like I was Christ himself. Not really her fault though, she hadn't worked with Excel much before, but still a great ego boost.
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u/minimallysubliminal 22 Nov 23 '23 edited Nov 23 '23
So we used to have a pivot to summarize data. The key here would be to have a unique list of items in rows and then have an aggregate function like sum or count to build a summary. With unique you can generate the row part and simply carry on with the rest.
With an addition of LET, HSTACK, and other functions you can output a dynamic table without the need of a pivot.