An Eventful Week

Welcome to May! This last week has been rather eventful around the Wyatt household for two reasons.

First, those who have subscribed to the newsletter for a while know that we live in the Southwest corner of Wyoming. Despite living here for the past decade, we have decided that it is time to move, once again. This time it is because the high altitude here (6,700 ft.) has an adverse effect on my wife's health. So, we have decided to move to Mesquite, Nevada, a small border town at a much lower elevation (1,600 ft.). We figure that dropping almost a mile in altitude should help.

In preparation for the move, on Wednesday our house in Wyoming was placed under contract. That means that if all goes well, we should be moved in about four weeks. That leads me to the second big event this past week. The same day that the house went under contract was our 50th wedding anniversary. (Yes, I'm getting *that* old.) I count it a singular blessing to be able to spend my life with my love and my best friend. We are hoping that this move will help prolong our years together as time inexorably moves on. So, Wednesday was a rather significant day for us.

I will keep you up to date about the move, as there is still much to do to make the plan a reality.

My best to you and I hope you enjoy the tips in this week's newsletter.

—Allen

ExcelTips (ribbon) for 2 May 2026

Finding the Latest Value in a Range

If you need to evaluate the values in a large cell range and return a date associated with where a value occurs, it can be perplexing. This tip examines such a scenario and presents four formulas you could use to return the desired date.

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(Thanks to Ryszard Raciborski, Rick Rothstein, Michael Avidan (MVP), Kevin Keyser, Brian Dorey, James Woolley, John Vander Linden, Steve Aprahamian, and Patrick Sedgwick for contributing to this tip.)

Easily Changing Links

If you have linked information in your worksheets, you may want a way you can easily change the targets to which those links are pointing. One way you can do this is to make the links dynamic, using the INDIRECT worksheet function.

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PivotTables Make You Feel Faint?

Do you get weak in the knees when asked to deal with huge amounts of data? Forget feeling faint ever again when you are asked to deal with PivotTables. Learn much more than the basics with PivotTables for the Faint of Heart, now available in three great versions.

Defeating Automatic Date Parsing

Excel is continually trying to figure out what type of data is being stored in a cell. If it can interpret a value as a date, it will do so at the drop of a hat. Here's how to stop Excel from doing that parsing and messing up your data.

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(Thanks to Peter McNab for contributing to this tip.)

Swapping Two Numbers

When programming macros, variables are used extensively. At some point you might want to exchange the values held in two variables. Here's the technique to accomplish the task.

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(Thanks to Rick Rothstein and Alan Elston for contributing to this tip.)

Help Wanted

This section is for those having problems making Excel behave. If Excel is giving you fits, feel free to submit your own Help Wanted question.

If you have a solution for the problems below, click the link after the problem to send us your answer. (All responses become the sole property of Sharon Parq Associates, Inc., and can be used in any way deemed appropriate.) If your response is used in a future issue, you will be credited for your contribution to the answer.

Converting a Range of Cells into Comma-Separated Values

I know I can save a worksheet as a CSV file. However, I only need to convert the range C2:J51 into a CSV. Is there an easy way to do this?
—Harrison Kilmer (provide an answer for this Help Wanted question)

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