Office Scripts

For years, Microsoft has been trying to replace VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), the programming language that “lives” in the background of Excel. As they say, the reasons are of a security nature. This is not entirely without merit, but it seems to me that the motive of the Excel development team, to a greater extent, was to create scripts that would fit better into the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform ecosystem. Whether they succeeded in this is up to you to try.

3D charts

A large number of Excel charts also have their 3D version. Although in most cases this is just unnecessary embellishment, making it difficult to draw conclusions, sometimes 3D charts really do make sense. In the text that follows, you will find out how to make this type of chart, as well as how you can change the perspective of looking at the data…

Highlighting found values

When working with large tables, it is often necessary to make their search easier. One of the ways to do this is by applying the option for conditional formatting, with which we can mark all rows in which a value corresponding to the given criteria was found. In the next “recipe” you will find out how to perform such task.

YEARFRAC function

This function, for given start and end date, calculates how much time has passed in years, and as a result returns a decimal number. It can be used to calculate annual interest, future value and in other cases when it is necessary to know how many years have passed. In the text that follows, through a simple example, you will get to know this function.

Retreiving data from pictures

Power Query (which has been the go-to tool for importing data into Excel for some time now) has a new option! Rereiving data from PDF documents has been around for a long time, and now you can also pick up tables from an image or image on the clipboard. So, if someone sends you an invoice that they took a photo of via Viber or WhatsApp, you don’t have to enter the data manually.