Quest 1: The Coneservation

https://everybody.codes/event/2026/quests/1

Past Coding Challenge spiel on etiquette:

https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/1pbgisa/advent_of_code_2025_day_1/

I have seen a lot of memes and jokes about using a mouse in excel. Although, I don't have any excel work but based on my career path it's not far until i sit on it 6-8 hours a day but I've always seen people saying mouse in excel is a crime is there any good explanation for it? I mean i get it excel has a lot of shortcuts for keyboard key combinations. Although, when I last used excel my mouse seemed to be more efficient in general selecting and scrolling.

Preface: This is using Excel 2016. I can't do much about that atm.

I'm trying to improve a quoting template so I can get more help maintaining them (will be protecting the worksheets for my sanity).

The concept:

• List of Products/SKUs with a numbered helper column
• Second list for Accessories (if needed) that would have a matching number to the first list
• Output on a scope of work sheet as:
• Item 1
• Item 1 - Accessory #1
• Item 1 - Accessory #2
• Item 2
• Item 3

Is this even possible? Or will I need to add the # reference to the scope sheet and just hope they follow along?

Bonus points if the output also ignores blanks, but I'm not getting my hopes up for that yet.

Edit: Screenshot from Worksheet

I have an entire document with people's addresses that was correct and the final version somehow had everyone's addresses incorrect due to the numbers shifting by 1. Example if someone lives at first st 124 it changed their address to first st 123....

What could I have done during my formatting to get excel to put that data into mail merge to bring on mailing labels could have altered everyone's address numbers?

I'm actually being driven crazy and excel doesn't seem to have the versions pervious that isn't the very first document that I gave it.... with the correct addresses in it....

The only thing I can think of is when I used the brush to copy format that may have done something but I literally made no changes to anyone's address.

Please help!

Happening every so often when saving a copy in MS365, and the user has to close the application and reopen, and the workbook has lost all progress since the previous save. The thing that is making my head scratch is that apparently, for years before I started here, by boss has worked with her to fix this, thinking that it has been fixed more than once, and it keeps coming back; though not nearly as often as when it started.

Anyone seen this before or have ideas of what could cause this? I'm not very familiar with excel.

I started a new job at the beginning of 2025 that has me doing a lot of reports on Excel. I'm by no ways an "excel pro" but I'm by far the best tech we have on using it, and probably one of the better people in our office overall.

I've got 4x reports for some buildings that I've done some testing in. Each of them has a sheet is a list of devices that we need to test, along with a bunch of information for each device in multiple columns.

I've been working a lot lately on getting our reports nice and consistent sizing and formatting wise, and spend a good 30-45 minutes on every job scrolling through 20-50 pages of reports doing little formatting changes, updating formulas, etc, just to make things neater and smoother for future years.

So on these 4x buildings, each of these device pages are formatted identically from what I can tell. Every column is the same width, every row is the same height. Margin options are identical. I go through and edit all of the cell sizes on essentially every report, just to make sure they're consistent. But I've got 4x reports now, where all cell row and column sizes are the same, all margin options are the same, any headings are identical. But if I do a "reset page breaks" and then drag my page break width to the column I want so that my A-M cells are all on a page, each report ends up a different scale. One ends up at 71% zoom, another at 83%, another at 81%, etc, despite all cell sizing and everything being the same as far as I can tell.

Curious if anyone has a reasoning for this.

hello everyone. i have a simple expenses tracker pivot table i did from ~3years ago but just recently noticed that when i update it, it became in alphabetical order instead of when the data was entered. i don't see a sort option of "when entered" or something along the lines, for the row's sort option.

is there a way for it to remain sorted when the data was entered other than A-Z / Z-A?

for example:

Item A has values in Apr
Item B has values in Jan, Feb, Mar

so in my pivot table, i want it to show as:
Jan Feb Mar Apr
Item B xxx xxx xxx
Item A xxx

but it's now showing like so:
Jan Feb Mar Apr
Item A xxx
Item B xxx xxx xxx

any help will be appreciated, i'm really losing my mind. i even tried to re-do the whole pivot table but it's still in alphabetical order.

I've been using excel app on an android phone for over a year with no issues but starting yesterday anytime i try to filter something and type text into the search box for that it only let's me type in one letter before switching my typing to renaming the cell so after typing it one letter I have to keep clicking back into the filter search box to type another letter into it. Have already tried reinstalling and resetting the app.

I'm getting a message on my MS office files that says "activate Microsoft 365 to create and edit". I can't save any of my files anymore. The reason is that support for office 2021 is over. unfortunately, that's the license I have. So I'm trying onlyoffice. so far so good.

I need to break up one long column of data down to the data in a new column for each day. There is a data point for each hour of each day, and the hourly data needs to be sorted by day in that day's column.

See comments for re-uploaded pic

Thank you in advance for taking the time to look at this!

Description of Spreadsheet (I have a small example below as well):

• I have a spreadsheet full of responses: Column A is the respondees name, column B is when the response was submitted, column C through GM (I know :l) is whether they are available or unavailable for each date with the date along row 1. Each person input several responses throughout the time period and didn't necessarily include availability for dates passed.

What I'm Trying to Do

• I'm attempting to condense this spreadsheet with only one row for each person so I can see how many people we had available for each date in the record. The idea would be to have one set of names in column A and the dates listed in row 1, then in each cell have it search the data for the correct name and a response date that is less than the date of the column it's in.

I tried using an xlookup with boolean logic and changing the search mode between 1 and -1 but it seems like the entire concept of it returning values from different lines is not happening.

I feel as if there has to be an easier way to do this but I'm coming up blank!

I'm an extreme beginner and figured i could help a family member, who is even less knowledgeable than I am, out with their project. I'm looking for a formula/way to quickly fill in the difference of these values on the respective "non" cell to avoid having them filling in each value by hand as at this point its not possible to change the layout of the data. I have access to Google sheets and Microsoft Office LTSC Professional Plus 2024, both on desktop. I hope it is clear what im asking for and tried following the rules, i apologise if it is not and thank you for your time in advance.

I am trying to make a vacation planner. The ones online I have found aren’t quite right or cost money. I want make a das board that will display checklists on other pages as done or not( ie all boxes checked, corresponding box on dashboard will turn green. How is this achieved?

For an assignment, I have to show multiple scatterplots with quick style 9 (regression) for a Units Produced column and different costs associated with production. The chart for each Input Cost A, C, and D returns normal data as y=3x, 500, and 2x+4000 respectively, but I keep getting y=1.1x-3E-10 for Input Cost B

I've tried manually selecting the column, copy-pasting from Inputs A and C and moving the selected column to B, and typing in the data to be used in the chart data window, but I keep getting the same results or having to start over again with a clean sheet. Can someone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong?

Happy to share screenshots or whatever else would be helpful

I am trying to make a little budget worksheet just for fun. I want it to track income and tax over however long I use the budget sheet, and I want it to total each week's income and tax correctly even when future weeks still show zeros. Since each week is written out each month (with random numbers), there will be zeros where there will be numbers in the future.

I have used the formulas =SUMPRODUCT((V1:AM164="Revenue($):")*IFERROR(V2:AM165*1,0)) and =SUMPRODUCT((V4:AM78="Tax($):")*IFERROR(V5:AM79*1,0)) to count the tax and money made, shown in the image in the comments. I’m not sure what’s going wrong; if somebody can help, that would be fantastic.

!MacBook user! hello everyone, is there any way to filter data from different tables to show a specific rating? for example, if i wanted to filter all the tables to only show songs i have rated a "10?"

Hello, I'm using Excel 2019. I'd like the cells in my Date column to,

1. Have a light red background with red text if their date is older than 10/1/2026
2. Not have a light red background with red text if their cell is blank (there is no value/formula in these cells)

For the example above, just cells A4 and A5 should change color. Thank you for your time!

Edit: Made image smaller and added Excel version.

Saturday, October 17 - Friday, October 23, 2026

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Hi! I'm new to excel and I need to work out how to combine the content of 4-5 cells into one, with line breaks between the content of each cell.

I've found several ways of combining content (https://spreadsheetplanet.com/combine-cells-excel/), but the formulae won't take CHAR(10) as a separator character as described here: https://www.exceldemy.com/excel-char-10/

So I've tried let's say =C2&"CHAR(10) "&D2&"CHAR(10) "&E2&"CHAR(10) "&F2 and it gave me an error in the formula cell.

I assume concat and textjoin would result in the same error as the problem seems to be the CHAR(10).

Anyone smarter than me, any suggestions? ty

ETA after mod autopost: desktop version of Excel, idk the exact version as it's on my work computer. Super beginner. Will happily add info as needed but it'll have to wait until Tue when I'm back at work

Hi Everyone, Excel does not seem to be able to handle a current xy dataset I am trying to plot as soon as I include empty cells. It changes the X-axis to the cell number instead of the cell value:

A likely related problem is that Excel is not currently recognizing these empty cells as empty. The cells are the result of formulas, but whether I use NA() or "" in the formula, they are still coming up when I search for cells containing text. (The plot DOES work when I delete the cells highlighted as text, but ideally I do not have to do this.)

I am usually able to fix stuff like this in the select data tab, but have not been able to solve this one for some reason.

Any thoughts or insight would be greatly appreciated - thank you so much in advance!

EDIT: I have corrected my language to say that the cells are the result of formulas which tell them to be blank, rather than as a result of "programming" which would instead suggest that I am using scripts.

As the title says, I cannot open any of the default templates in my version of Excel (16.16.27) for Mac. I'm running MacOS 11.7.11. I am able to open a blank workbook, but when I click 'Create' after selecting any of the templates, I get this error popup:

Sorry, we couldn't find {5158210B-13B3-C343-AD83-9F57F57CEB70}TF021319d1-8fd9-4017-acd1-4bbaa149d16ea012565-7fc77437defb.xl. Is it possible it was moved, renamed or deleted?

The string of letters and numbers changes depending on the template, but the end result of not being able to open the template is the same. I've found some answers for custom templates, but my issue is with the default templates. Thanks in advance for any help.

I need help converting a 800+ page payroll report with very employee IDs showing up on only one row and the period (month) on the top of the page.

Power query crashes when I try to upload the document so cant use it. And the data in it is confidential so I cant try free software avaliable online.

I work in a nonprofit doing payroll, we provide in home care for disabled vets. This is a mock up of the actual file I really use. Is there a way to bolden the final row of each workers total hours. Some vets have multiple workers. We have over 600 vets and I do this all by myself. Then it gets review afterwards by the program managers. It would make it easier on them if the totals stood out to them.

I included the image below

Been having an error pop up in my workbook:

“Micro Microsoft Excel cannot calculate a formula. There is a circular reference in an open workbook, but the reference that cause it cannot be listed for you. Try editing the last formula you entered or removing it with the undo command.”

I don’t have an exact point in time it noticed the error.

The file was from another team.

There are no cells with circulars at the moment, no hidden tabs, no other workbooks open, no external connections.

Removed all macros and hidden names and still have it haunting me.

Would appreciate anyone’s thoughts.

I've tried to create a budget sheet for me and my partner but it means downloading CSV files of multiple bank accounts and then adding to one workbook. I then want to allocate each transaction to a category and populated to say how much we have spent over the last 12 months and forecast possible spend for the next 3 months.

I can do this quite easily on excel but my partner and I do not have an excel licence accepted via work emails so ideally I'd like to host and share the spreadsheet on Google sheets so we can both view this when we need to.

Is there a way in which I can convert and keep all the complexity behind it from excel to Google sheets?

Or is there any apps or suggestions in which I could approach this differently?

Ideally I want to see the following:

- total spend over the past 12 months

- allocate into categories (food, fuel, insurance...)

- link to current spending

- forecast future possible spend

- personal debt monitoring and forecasting which I can add extra payments to if the person who owes me money, adds to this amount.