Mention the INDIRECT function in an Excel forum and you'll start a fight. It's volatile, meaning it's always awake and recalculating, which can turn a fast spreadsheet into a sluggish mess. But used correctly, it's a power user's secret weapon for building dynamic, reactive dashboards.

Google Sheets is hiding a massive productivity feature in plain sight: the timeline builder. It's dynamic, it's colorful, and best of all, it updates itself. So, forget the manual formatting—here's how to build your own visualized project tracker in just five minutes.

VBA used to be the only way to handle iterative, multistep logic in Microsoft Excel. Not anymore. REDUCE brings the power of functional programming directly into your cells, allowing you to condense complex, messy data into single, clean results.

Many Excel users abandon the ROWS function because it feels like a technicality they can skip. However, to build a truly functional workbook, you need formulas that adapt to your data dimensions, and the ROWS function is ideal for this. Here are four ways I use it to make my Excel spreadsheet smarter.

Don't let that extra "S" fool you—ROW and ROWS do completely different jobs in Excel. One tells you where you are, while the other tells you how much space you have. If you're tired of formulas breaking when you delete a row, it's time to master the difference between these two tools.

You've built a perfect Excel table, but the moment you try to use its headers in a drop-down menu, everything breaks. Excel's Data Validation is notoriously picky with tables, but there's a clever workaround. So, stop hard-coding your menus and use this dynamic sync instead.

Your Excel spreadsheet might be lying to you. No, it's not a conspiracy—it's just a collection of common, invisible killers that bypass error checks and ruin your reporting. So, let's hunt down these silent traps and fix them for good.

People often confuse Excel's LAMBDA and SCAN functions because they often appear together in formulas. However, they aren't the same: LAMBDA is the "brain" that defines the logic, and SCAN is the "vehicle" that carries it out. Here's how to tell them apart.

There's a ghost in your Excel spreadsheet. It's that invisible text box you keep accidentally clicking, or the chart that refuses to be selected. Instead of losing your mind, use the Selection Pane, the hidden sidebar that reveals every object on your sheet so you can manage them with ease.

Stop trying to win an Excel Hero award with ten-line formulas. They're impossible to debug and even harder to explain to your coworkers. Using helper columns doesn't mean you're a beginner—it means you're an engineer building a system that actually lasts. Here's why the simplest solution is actually the best.

Excel now supports IMPORTTEXT and IMPORTCSV functions that load external text and CSV files as dynamic arrays, making it easier to refresh and reuse frequently updated data inside a worksheet.

The post Microsoft Excel’s new import functions make handling numbers easier appeared first on Digital Trends.

Excel's fill handle is fine for a few rows, but in a big dataset, it's an error waiting to happen. Why drag and drop when you can automate? The MAP function lets you write a single formula that spills logic across your whole sheet, keeping your data clean and your workflow streamlined.

Whether you're starting a new business venture and need Microsoft Office's help or you just want to get better organized in your personal life, it's a good time to take advantage of this deal.

The post Get Lifetime Access to Microsoft Office 2021 for Just $35 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Whether you're starting a new business venture and need Microsoft Office's help or you just want to get better organized in your personal life, it's a good time to take advantage of this deal.

The post Get Lifetime Access to Microsoft Office 2021 for Just $35 appeared first on TechRepublic.