Excel Tip

This is a good one. Let's say you've brought over some spreadsheets of contacts from your old job, but don't know how long it has been since you've made a sales call. You can just use the DATEDIF function in Excel.

Identify the cells with the last date a sales call was made, like in A1, and then write this formula in the next cell, like in B1, to calculate the time: =DATEDIF(A1,NOW(),"y")

You can than use Excel's IF function -- for example, =IF(A2>Y) -- to identify all the days that are greater than a certain amount. This way you can follow up with your clients after two weeks and just touch base with them on any ongoing transactions.

Excel Tip

I found out this awesome trick in Excel. Check it:

If you get a workbook from someone, you can figure out what formulas they used by selecting all the cells (ctrl+A), then going to "Edit - GoTo - Special". There you click "Formulas" and "ok" and this selects the cells with formulas. You can now make those cells have red or bold font! If you click the backwards apostrophe (under the tilde), it will even show all the actual formulas.

Here's where it gets crazy. If you go to "Tools - Formula Auditing" and click "Trace Precedents", Excel will draw a blue line from all the input data cells to the destination cell, even if the input data is from a different workbook!

Now you know how the formulas work in your new workbook of data.