Member of month, Excel links and Cooked HDD

I have an exciting announcement for you.

Member of the Month

Starting this month I will announce one member of our little community as member of month. It is to honor the contribution they made.

Jeff Weir is our member of month for July, 2009. He not only commented more than 40 times in the last month, but he even wrote a marvelous guest post on the chart busters series. I have learned several valuable excel and charting tips from him in the past few weeks. I am sure some of have too. Thank you Jeff.

Some good excel links

It has been a while since we have posted any excel links here. Here is some good stuff to start with.

Make Office Better

If you have an opinion on things that can be improved in Excel (or other office applications like Word, Powerpoint, Access or Outlook) please share them through this site. The site, started by Steve and Luke, employees of MS lets you vote on some of the most popular user suggested improvements for MS Office. You can even start your own suggestion and gather votes. It is not clear what happens to the highly voted items though. [via codeforoutlookandexcel]

10 Tips on thinking like a designer

Garr Reynolds lists down some cool tips that can help you think like a designer. Design plays a vital role when it comes to telling your stories. He says in tip (7)

Think communication not decoration. Design — even graphic design — is not about beautification. Design is not just about aesthetics, though aesthetics are important. More than anything, design is about solving problems or making the current situation a little better than before. Design is not art, though there is art in design.

Very useful advice.

How databars are improved in Excel 2010

Official Excel blog tells us about the subtle but important databar improvements in Excel 2010. In the earlier version (2007), data bars are kind of crippled as they show minimum value of the data range as 0 (with 10% bar) and maximum with a 90% bar. This creates a wrong impression. They have corrected this in 2010 and added few more goodies like support for negative bars.

Transposing a dataset with Pivot tables

Bacon bits is fast becoming my favorite blog. I am not sure why Mike didn’t start writing earlier, he writes so well. In this post, Mike, the data pig, teaches us how to transpose a dataset with pivot tables. Pivot tables are a very powerful analysis feature in excel. I use this particular technique quite often when I need to arm twist my data.

Do You Have an Excel or Charting Question ?

Do you know that you can ask your excel and charting questions on our brand new forum? Yes, you can. We have more than 200 members there and one of us will help you find the right answer to your questions. Register today and start your discussion.

PS: My personal laptop has crashed and stopped booting. Seems like the HDD is cooked 😛 I have left it with the Toshiba service cetner folks today. Expect fewer posts in the next week or so.

Hello Awesome...

My name is Chandoo. Thanks for dropping by. My mission is to make you awesome in Excel & your work. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. When I am not F9ing my formulas, I cycle, cook or play lego with my kids. Know more about me.

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Thank you and see you around.