Excel does not display negative time. So if you are working with negative times, there is a problem. Fortunately, there are ways to work around this issue.

This tutorial will show two ways to display a negative time in Excel.

For this example, we have the fastest times for the last six London Marathons for the men’s category. And we want to see the time difference compared to the previous year.

If the time is faster than the previous year, the result will be a negative time. A slower time would return a positive time.

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In this tutorial, we will use Excel formulas to lookup multiple values and combine the results into a single cell, or row. We will also order the returned values in two different ways.

The formulas used in this tutorial are only available in Excel 365 and Excel Online. They take advantage of the array engine of modern Excel. This video show you how to lookup multiple values in all Excel versions.

Watch the video below, or read on. This tutorial covers three examples of a lookup formula to return multiple values.

Lots of information, so let’s dive into the action.

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Working recently at a large Internet company they needed to find how many words were in a cell. This was because they had imported hundreds of thousands of keywords that customers had used to find their site through search engines.

To analyse this data they wanted to count how many words were in each cell containing keyword searches. Excel provides many text functions for managing and manipulating the text in the cells of your spreadsheet. The following formula did the job.

=LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(A2),” “,””))+1

This formula subtracts a version of the cell without spaces between each word from a version still with spaces. This finds out how many spaces there are. There will be one less space than there are words so the resulting answer has a 1 added to it to find how many words there are.

The LEN function is used to find how many text characters are in the cell.
The SUBSTITUTE function is used to replace the spaces between each word with nothing making one long word.

The TRIM function is used to remove any spaces at the beginning or end of the cell content. This cleanses the cell of any erroneous spaces put in by user error, or error on import.

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