Evaluate formula

Amid this festive, sunday & cricket mood.. lets have another posting....

If you have a lengthy nested formula and you are not sure about the result, it is better to debug and evaluate the formula one step at a time to find out whether the result, which is coming is correct or not.

Now to evaluate this formula step by step follow these steps:

1. Select the cell with the formula, which needs to be evaluated
2. Go to the Formulas tab of the ribbon. On the formulas tab, select evaluate formula from the Formula Auditing group.

3. From the Evaluate formula dialog box, click on evaluate to get the result of the underlined part of the formula. Pressing evaluate again will show the result of the next underlined part of the formula. This process can be repeated till the time the entire formula has been evaluated.

Fill the empty cells below

I am sure you have faced a situation where the data has been copied out of a pivot table, which looks like this

Many a times there is a need that you fill up the empty cells under a section with the same values. Like in the above example you need ABC in row number 2 to 5 and BCD in row number 8 to 11. There are many ways to accomplish this, with Copy - paste, Ctrl + D, Using power utils add in to name a few.

There is a way using formulas and selecting visible cells. To use this way apply the formula in the first empty cell (A3 in our case). The formula should pick up the value from the cell above to it. In our case A3 should contain a formula "=A2".

Follow these steps to fill all the empty cells with the contents which appear once in the section.

1. Copy the cell in which the formula is applied.
2. Apply an auto filter on the same column. Select all the empty cells that come as a result.
3. Filter for the blank cells, press "Ctrl +G". From the Go To dialog box, click on "Special". From the "Go To Special: dialog box select "Visible Cells only" and then click "OK". This will leave only the empty cells which are below the section text.
4. Now paste the formula which you have copied. And all the empty cells will be filled with the section text. 

Automatic Calculations

By default an Excel sheet calculates the formula result automatically. This is indeed a great feature with the user only need to worry about the values in the cell, and any change in these values result in changes in the formula result  by its own.