Archive for March, 2012

This week many Excel bloggers are celebrating VLOOKUP week. So I wanted to chip in and give you a comprehensive guide to VLOOKUP & Other lookup formulas. Read on …,

What is VLOOKUP Formula & how to use it?

I often tell my excel school students that learning VLOOKUP formulas will change your basic approach towards data. You will suddenly feel that you have discovered a superman cape in your attic. It is that awesome.

“I was trying to calculate the average DJIA # by month. I had the data by day so tried various combos (none of which worked) (:-”

Learn how to help Suzanne average the DJIA on a particular day and learn about a new Excel Function all in one post.

As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, I have asked you to share your favorite tips & techniques for speeding up Excel. And what-a-mind-blowing response you gave. 75 of you responded with lots of valuable tips & ideas to speed-up Excel formulas, VBA & Everything else.

Thanks to all the contributors

Many thanks to everyone who shared their tips & ideas with us. If you like the tips, please say thanks to the contributor.

Read Excel Speeding-up tips by area

This page is broken in to 3 parts, click on any link to access those tips.

Read everything
Formula Speeding-up Tips
VBA / Macros Optimization Tips
Everything Else
Share your tips

As part of Speedy Spreadsheet Week, I have emailed few renowned Excel experts and asked them to share their tips & ideas to speedup Excel. Today, I am glad to present a collection of the tips shared by them. Read the Excel optimization & speeding up tips shared by Hui, Luke, Narayan, George, Gregory & Jordon.

Today, I am taking a break from Speedy Spreadsheet Week to celebrate Telugu New year with my family. Ugadi (meaning start of a new era) is celebrated on first day of Telugu year and occurs in March / April.

Here is a pic from early today morning, when we could finally convince the kids to laugh when the camera clicks.

Is VBA slowing down your workbooks? Do you spend hours starting at Excel while the macros finish running? As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, today lets talk about optimization techniques for Excel VBA & Macros.

Optimization Techniques for Excel VBA & Macros

Lets break this in to 2 sections. (1) Quick optimization techniques & tactics (2) Optimization ideas for the long run. Read on…,

Is Excel acting slow & taking ages? As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, today lets talk about optimizing & speeding up Excel by formatting & charting better. Use these tips & ideas to super-charge your sluggish workbook.

No matter how much data you got, how many formulas you wrote, the end users seldom see them on your workbook. They see the finalized dashboard, they play with the model, they look at the report. And if you make poor choices, your end users will thing your workbook is slow.

So let me present you 7 charting & formatting tips to optimize & speed up Excel. Read on…,

In recent installment of Customer Service Dashboard post, our reader Salmon asked an interesting question,

I am struggling with data size with my dashboards…so many SQL data pulls and formulas to generate the Dashboard, the entire file is massive and sluggish. Perhaps a few tips from Chandoo Master for all us rookie dashboard designers regarding how to minimize file size and maximize calc speeds. #

Dan l & others chipped in and shared their ideas on speeding up Excel. But the topic is wide & has many solutions. So I am dedicating an entire week to discuss this. Welcome to Speedy Spreadsheet Week.

Welcome back. In part 2 of Making a Customer Service Dashboard using Excel let us learn how the data & calculations for the dashboard are setup.

Designing Customer Service Dashboard
Data and Calculations for the Dashboard
Creating the dashboard in Excel
Adding Macros & Final touches

In this installment, we will examine all the variables, named ranges & various formulas that drive our dashboard. Also, you can download the full dashboard workbook and play with it to examine these formulas and learn better.

We briefly covered Excel’s Go To Special function in the Managing Spreadsheet Risk series and in this post, we are going to explore Go to special feature in detail and learn how to use it.

What is Go To Special?

Go To Special is a tool within Microsoft Excel that enables you to quickly select cells of a specified type within your Excel worksheet. Once you get to grips with this function and what it can be used for you will wonder how you ever lived without it. Read on…,

Cornelia wanted to cumulatively increases prices to a lot of products.
See how it was accomplished using an Array Formula to assist.

Did you know you can apply any text effect to a single character or group of text characters within a cell ?

This post will show you 2 quick tips to assist you in this technique.

A while ago, our reader Shay emailed me a Sales Funnel chart template.

I had to create a sales funnel for my company and I looked all over the internet to see how to do what I needed to do. I couldn’t find anything. I tried your funnel chart as well but because my numbers are all over the place I couldn’t get it to work for me.

I get so much information from you that I decided to share this chart with you. I used the shapes drawings to create the funnel graphic and the camera tool to place the values in each shape. I used formulas in the original data so that I will not have to recalculate every month.

I took the liberty of making little changes to Shay‘s funnel chart template to make it even better. Here is how the funnel looks like.

If you like to analyze data, then you would fall in love with Pivot Tables on first sight. Pivot tables are a powerful, dead-simple & lovely way to play with your data, automate your reports and save time. That said, not all of us know how to use them or how to get them to […]

“I have a large list which includes blanks, I want to retrieve the list without the blanks”
Faseeh, responded with a neat array formula.

Today Formula Forensics pulls Faseeh’s Formula apart to see what makes it tick.