Here is an interesting use of Excel. Use it to design User Interface Prototypes.
A UI Prototype is one of the steps we do while developing systems. It contains a clear and detailed user interface mocked up so that we can clearly find-out how end-users would react to such a system.
Now, there are a ton of great tools to build UI prototypes, easiest of them being pencil and paper. But I have been using Excel (ahem!) for creating UI prototypes for the last few years with great success.
In almost all the projects where I worked as a business analyst, I used Excel (or Powerpoint) to create clear, well defined UI mockups to show what the end system would look like. This has helped greatly in understanding various unstated needs of users and speeded up system development.
A Practical Example of UI Prototypes made in Excel
Today I want to show you a practical example of how UI prototypes designed in Excel helped me choose one alternative over other.
While creating Excel School sales page, I needed to clearly show both options and provide a way to select one of them for the prospective students. I had 2 ideas in mind. I wasn’t sure which one would work. My initial thought is to draw both of them on paper and show it to my wife and find-out which one she would prefer. But then, my drawing is as good as my skateboarding. Just plain awful.
Even though I cannot draw a peanut on paper, I can create a whole peach tree in excel. So I turned to it and created 2 exact mockups of what I had in mind.
Then I showed both of them to my wife. She pointed to the one on left.
So I went with that option and designed it in HTML / CSS later that night.
But, this is a lame example. What if I want to make a complex UI in Excel?
Of course my example is lame. But you can make complex UIs in Excel with same ease. Remember form controls? You can use them to quickly create a mock up of almost any system and show it to your users to get instant feedback.
Here is an example:
Download Excel UI Prototype Examples Workbook:
In this workbook, you can find above 3 examples. See them, play with them, poke them to get inspiration for your next UI prototype.
Do you use Excel for Prototyping?
As I said, I have more than once impressed my customers by quickly churning out a mockup using excel. You can easily add drawing shapes, icons, form controls and place them on the grid layout to give perfect alignment and look. I think this is a great use of Excel.
What about you? Do you use excel for UI Prototyping? Share your experiences using comments.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.