Archive for October, 2008

Starting next week, PHD is going to feature a 30 post series on spreadcheats. The purpose of these posts is to make day to day spreadsheeting a breeze. Each post will be less than 200 words in size and aspires to make your day at office a little bit more productive. I have already identified […]

Yesterday Microsoft announced in PDC (professional developers conference) that it will be releasing a web based version office applications – Word, Excel, Power Point, One Note later this year. This is an exciting news since you can access the goodness of these powerful desktop apps inside a browser for free. No more hassles of upgrading […]

This is a Guest Post by Robert on Visualization Techniques for Excel KPI Dashboards. This 6 Part Tutorial on Management Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs in the […]

There is always a debate about how good or evil pie charts are. While visualization purists believe pie charts should be avoided at all costs, newbies find creating and using pies very easy and often over do it. I have blogged few techniques involving pie chart visualizations like in-cell pie charts, speedometer charts, donut clocks […]

By now everyone and their grandmother must have known about how Republican National Committee has spent $ 150,000 on Sarah Palin’s clothing and make up. I am a big fan of clothes. So much that I wear them everyday. But not all of us have a committee or fund raisers to dress up ourselves, none […]

Remember the photographic fridays? Some of you must be thinking whatever happened those posts? Well, my intention for writing those posts has been to get your feedback so that few of us can become better photographers. But flickr does a hell of better job for this than my little blog can. So I have decided […]

Every week, Pointy Haired Dilbert celebrates the art of chart making by sharing 4-5 of the most beautiful visualizations floated around the web in the last few days. Take a look at them and have some inspiration and fun 😀 Map of most popular social networks in each country This is a simple world map, […]

First of all, thanks everyone for making the should you always start barcharts at zero? discussion lively. Almost everyone felt that we should start bar charts at zero. After spending sometime with my initial test cricket statistics dashboard, I have created few alternatives. You can see them below. But somehow I feel that I haven’t […]

Sorting text is such a day to day activity that it always surprises me why Excel hasn’t provided a simple spreadsheet formula for doing it. Of course you can use the sorting menu command (menu > data > sort) but this requires manual steps (or VBA). Most of the times we get raw textual data […]

It all began with my Excel Dashboard Tutorial – Making a dashboard with player statistics. I have used bar charts with axis whose minimum is not zero, to create a dramatic effect in the charts. See below: Jon Peltier commented saying that, Rule #1: Bar and column chart value axes should start at zero. Since […]

One of my favorite cricket player, the GOD – Sachin Tendulkar has become highest test run scorer. What do I get if Sachin becomes highest scorer, you may ask. In order to celebrate this occasion I have created a cool sports dashboard in excel with some of the top test cricket players’ statistics. And, you […]

Today I am celebrating my 27th birthday. “not much left before thirty”, my wife playfully reminds me. “We still have 3 more years to go”, I said, thinking about all those things to do before I turn thirty list. All in all the year has been fantastic. We have moved to US for work reasons, […]

Here is a simple copy pasting tip. Next time when you want to paste a set of copied cells to another area, instead of using CTRL+V, just use ENTER. See this: Learn 16 more excel copy pasting tricks today.

Animals in the Zoo – Creative Bar Chart This creative bar chart shows the distribution of various zoo inhabitants. The yellow strip is for birds, green bar is for amphibians, orange strip is for mammals and finally the curly green bar in the end is for, you guessed it right, reptiles. Also shown in the […]

Yesterday is Blog Action day and tons of bloggers posted about single topic – poverty. It is a topic very close to my heart for various reasons. It is a very sad thing not to have food or shelter or healthy living conditions. But man has thrived in all those situations just because he learned […]