There’s an Excel calendar, Excel lookup functions, and more, in this month’s Excel news.
- Excel Event Calendar
- Quick Ribbon Tip
- Excel Lookup Functions
- Excel and AI
- Monthly Photo
Excel Event Calendar
Long ago, I made an Excel holiday planning calendar that showed a list of events under each date. The calendar worked, but it needed lots of helper columns.
Now I’ve made a new version, and it shows up to 5 events per day, sorted by time. It also warns you if a date’s list runs out of room (red italic font).
You can see more details, and get a copy of this event calendar, on my Contextures site. The calendar is built with formulas only – no macros.

Quick Ribbon Tip
Do you ever waste time, looking for a rarely-used command on the Excel Ribbon?
If your mouse has a scroll wheel, here’s a quick way to check each tab for a “lost” command:
- If the Ribbon is collapsed, double-click any tab, to expand the Ribbon
- Next, point anywhere on the Ribbon
- Then, on your mouse, slowly roll the scroll wheel
- toward you, to move right
- away from you, to move left
You can see more Excel Ribbon tips, on my Contextures site.

Excel Lookup Functions
Which of these lookup functions do you use most often?
- VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH, or LOOKUP?
When I asked that question online, VLOOKUP was the overall winner:
- 45% VLOOKUP
- 35% XLOOKUP
- 17% INDEX/MATCH
- 3% LOOKUP
The results varied by voting location – Twitter, YouTube, and my Contextures Blog. For now, YouTube people are sticking with VLOOKUP, but I hope they move to XLOOKUP soon!

Excel and AI
Is AI here to help us, or could it make our jobs obsolete? In this Wall Street Journal article, the consensus is that AI won’t make spreadsheets disappear, anytime soon!
Apparently, corporate AI tools don’t work well if:
- “critical data is stored across multiple systems…and employees end up downloading it all into spreadsheets”
Meanwhile, some people are using Microsoft Copilot, to get help with Excel formulas and VBA code. If you’ve tried Copilot, did you get good results?
Axe Me Anything!
It’s Father’s Day on Sunday, so we’ll celebrate with afternoon snacks on the back deck. It’s nice to stare at trees and flowers for a while, instead of computer screens.
And, for a change of pace, we’ll throw a few axes at our backyard target! We got ours at Costco, and the same set is sold on Amazon.
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That’s it for this month! Thanks for reading my Excel news, and you’ll get next month’s email on Tuesday, July 9th.
If you have any comments or questions, let me know!
— Debra
P.S. Visit my Contextures site for more Excel tips, tutorials and videos.
Original source: https://contexturesblog.com/archives/2024/06/11/excel-news-june-2024/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=excel-news-june-2024