As some of you know almost 10 days back I left Denmark and came back to India. I had to come back because of visa and personal issues. For the next 6 months PHDs will be based out of India and working from home. While this gives me a lot more time, I will be playing a lot with Nishanth and Nakshatra and spending time with Jo. I am hoping to write regularly and work on few interesting ideas (may be a new blog too) in this time. Let us see how the summer of 2010 works out.
In this week’s excel links,
Importing Text to Excel – All you need to know
When we work with external data, often the data is in a text file. Excel has a useful feature called “Text to Columns” that can help us take any text file and put the content in spreadsheet in a way we want. Jan Karel Pieterse, Microsoft Excel MVP rounds up the Import Text features in Excel in a very useful and informative article. Read it to learn various tricks and hidden features of text to columns utility.
Data Pig’s New Book on Excel and Access – First Chapter Free
Mike Alexander of Data Pig has a new book called The Excel Analyst’s Guide to Access
How to use custom lists to change the sort order
Some of you may know that when you write “Jan”, “Feb” in 2 cells and fill down, the rest of the cells automatically get “Mar”,”Apr”…,”Dec”. This is because they are defined as lists in Excel. We can add more lists to excel to help us in auto-fills. For eg. you can add the list of products (or projects or employees) to excel as a custom list. Once the values are in custom list, we can use the list order to sort our tables in custom order too. Debra shares a little tip on how to do this. Read more about this on Contextures website.
Why stacked bar charts are not such a good idea
Tony from Support Analytics dissects a stacked column chart and tells us why stacking may not be a very good idea. He proposes using a line chart or panel chart instead. Read the commentary so that you can avoid such mistakes in future.
Transferring data within VBA Macros
Doug from Newton Excel Bach has an informative article on how to use variables in VBA. If you write / work with macros I recommend reading this post to understand some of the key ideas on variable scope.
Do you want to share an excel tip or idea?
Pls. send me an email or post a comment and I will be glad to share interesting ideas and articles with our readers here.
11 Responses
Ciao Hui,
Collecting Excel tricks under the title “Notable Excel Websites (Non-MVP) Edition” is a brilliant idea…
Thank you in the name of all The FrankensTeam.
On our site there is a box with a picture and text highlighting:
This is a no-MVP site
we think ourselves “bad boys” a bit 🙂
For those who would like to know why our site is a no-MVP site, enough to click on the link:
http://goo.gl/lxDszY
Thank you again!
Thanks a lot
I really enjoyed this (newsletter). I must admit that I rarely read an Excel newsletter (and I subscribe to quite a few) all the way though, but this grabbed my attention and before I realized it, I was engrossed in it. I must also admit that most of this I don’t understand, yet. But, it excites me when I do learn something new in Excel. I can’t wait to see how much of this I can implement into my (constantly-evolving) ‘House Budget’ & ‘Family Medical’ worksheets that I have developed over the past few years! I sure hope to see more of these type of newsletters in the future! Thanks!
Thanks for doing this Hui! I appreciate being included.
I like Tom’s tip a lot. I posted about a tool I wrote to automate this at http://yoursumbuddy.com/tables-edit-query-dialog/
EXCELLENT !
Hui, This post is Superb! More over I have always been a fan of Roberto’s work and have learnt a lot from him.
Here are some of my recent contributions
1. Customising markers in a chart – http://www.goodly.co.in/customize-markers-in-a-chart/
2. Charting Hacks to work faster – http://www.goodly.co.in/5-charting-hacks-to-help-you-work-faster/
3. 7 Date formulas to make life easy – http://www.goodly.co.in/date-formulas-in-excel/
4. Customised scrollbar using VBA – http://www.goodly.co.in/customized-scroll-bar-in-excel/
5. Adding Direct Legends – http://www.goodly.co.in/customized-scroll-bar-in-excel/
Hope everyone enjoys!
I like the Excel Ninja Menus.
1. Select a cell or range then move till the 4-way cross appears. Right-Click and drag the selection to another place in the worksheet then, like a ninja, a menu full of skills and throwing stars pops up allowing me to do all kinds of awesomeness.
2. When you click the fill box on a Date and right click and drag it down, a lot of amazing Date options pop up.
I also brand my Excel to remind myself that I’m awesome. In my personal macro workbook I place the following code.
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Application.Caption = “SuperKrishna’s Awesomeness”
End Sub
My favorite tip goes along with #17. If you try to copy subtotaled data (and in earlier Excel versions filtered data),when you paste it all the data displays instead of just the summarized data.
To get around this, select your summarized data, click on Find and Select tab and then select Go to Special. Click Visible cells Only and click OK. Now paste and you will see that only the summarized data has been copied.
You can also go CTRL+G and then click the Special icon at the bottom of the dialog box.
What a great idea, Chandoo! I’d love to be included in your next edition:) Perhaps a VBA exclusive version?
@Ryan
I will review this concept about 6 months out from the original post and be sure to keep your site in mind
Hui…
That sounds great, Hui:) I just realized I gave credit to Chandoo for the idea and I should have attributed it to you.
Sorry about that!