Our Wealth

  SUMIF, COUNTIF and SUMIFS: When to Use Each One SUMIF adds up numbers that meet one condition, COUNTIF counts how many cells meet one condition, and SUMIFS extends SUMIF to handle multiple conditions at once. If you only need one condition, SUMIF or COUNTIF is simpler to read. The moment you need two or more conditions together, jump straight to SUMIFS rather than trying to stack separate SUMIFs — it'll save you a headache later. Early in my first office job, before anyone showed me these existed, I used to reconcile expense reports by literally printing them out and going down the page with a highlighter, matching entries by eye and adding totals on a calculator. It sounds ridiculous typing it out now, but nobody had told me any different, and the job got done, just painfully slowly. A colleague eventually looked over my shoulder, asked why I wasn't just using SUMIF, and I genuinely didn't know it existed. That one conversation probably saved me hundreds of hours ove...

  How to Make a Pivot Table in Excel: A Beginner's Guide A pivot table summarises large amounts of data into a smaller, readable table by grouping and calculating values automatically, without you writing a single formula. You build one by dragging field names into four boxes — Rows, Columns, Values, and Filters — and Excel does the counting, summing, or averaging for you. It's genuinely one of the highest-value skills in Excel, and it's a lot less intimidating than it looks once you've built two or three. I'm going to be honest about something here: pivot tables were the one Excel feature I avoided for years, purely out of habit, because early on someone showed me a rushed five-minute demo that made no sense and I decided they "weren't for me." I kept doing manual SUMIF formulas and sorting things by hand instead, which worked, but took forever on anything with a few thousand rows. It wasn't until I had to summarise a genuinely messy client d...

FILTER, SORT and UNIQUE in Excel: A Practical Guide FILTER, SORT and UNIQUE are dynamic array functions that let you pull, reorder, and de-duplicate data automatically, without needing pivot tables or manual copy-pasting. They "spill" their results across as many cells as needed, and update on their own whenever your source data changes. If you're on Microsoft 365, they're some of the most genuinely time-saving functions Excel has added in years, and once you get used to them it's hard to go back to the old way. I want to be upfront that this one took me longer to warm up to than VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH did. For years I built little manual processes — sort the data, then Advanced Filter it, then remove duplicates with the ribbon button, then repeat next month — because that's just how I'd always done it and it worked well enough. It wasn't until a manager asked me, on a Friday afternoon with about twenty minutes' notice, to pull "just the...

INDEX/MATCH Explained: Why Some People Still Swear By It INDEX/MATCH is two separate functions combined into one formula to look up a value — INDEX pulls a result from a range, and MATCH tells it exactly which position to pull from. It does the same basic job as VLOOKUP or XLOOKUP, but it's more flexible about direction and doesn't break as easily when your spreadsheet changes shape. If you've read my post comparing VLOOKUP and XLOOKUP, think of INDEX/MATCH as the formula that came before both of them and, for a lot of long-time Excel users, never really got replaced. I mentioned this one twice in my first post because it kept coming up, so here it is properly. A bit of background on why I still bother with this one. A few years back I inherited a workbook from a colleague who'd left the company, and every single lookup in it was VLOOKUP with a hardcoded column number. Someone had reordered the columns at some point after she left, and nobody noticed the numbers had all...

VLOOKUP vs XLOOKUP: Which One Should You Actually Learn? If you're choosing between the two today, learn XLOOKUP first. It does everything VLOOKUP does, fixes VLOOKUP's most annoying limitations, and is now available to most people with a Microsoft 365 licence. That said, VLOOKUP isn't dead, and there are still good reasons to understand it too — I'll get into those. Before I get into the formulas themselves, I want to explain why I'm starting this blog with this particular topic, because it's basically the reason the blog exists at all. I've been working in office jobs for about twenty years now, and in that time I've sat next to, managed, and been managed by an enormous range of Excel users. What's stuck with me isn't the skill gap between beginners and experts — that's obvious and expected. It's the gap between people who use two or three functions their entire career and somehow get by fine, and people who build formulas so elab...