This lesson shows you how to use Conditional Formatting in Excel to format cells containing dates that are in the past, using a conditional formatting rule that compares the date in a cell with today's date, and formats it a different colour if it is in the past. We'll also extend this conditional formatting example to check the value of another cell as part of our criteria for applying the formatting.

Excel's VLOOKUP function is excellent when you want to find a value in a table based on a lookup value. But if your table includes your lookup value multiple times, you'll find that VLOOKUP can't do it. This lesson shows you how to use the INDEX function (plus some other functions) to find all matching values in a list, and return a value from another column in the same row. It also looks at how to do this when you want to return all values which are a partial match (i.e. a wildcard search) to the values in your lookup table.

This lesson explains how to use Excel's logical operators and logical functions (AND, OR, NOT). These boolean operators can be used in a number of ways, either on their own, or to complement other Excel functions. In many cases, you can even use one of these functions instead of a more complicated function. For example, it is often easy to rewrite an IF statement using either AND or OR. This lesson includes examples of how to do this.

This Pivot Table lesson shows you how to use the Pivot Table Field Layout to quickly change the layout of your pivot table. This allows you to try different pivot table layouts so you can be sure your data is being grouped, aggegated and displayed in the most useful way possible. It also allow you to generate multiple reports from the same underlying data without having to create multiple pivot tables.