What does your sky look like?, originally uploaded by Chandoo.

We went to a near by amusement park for the July 4th weekend. Even though it was raining they had a decent turnout and we enjoyed alot going on the rides, playing with water, watching the parades and finally the fireworks. I tried capturing many pics, but I had no tripod and was too tired by then (it was almost 11 when these things went off), So only a few of them came out with any clarity, How do you like this one?

Also see the other ones on flickr:

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One of the latest news is that Yahoo has launched BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) using which you can build search based apps. Being a part geek who loves to show off my part knowledge to other part geeks during parties, I went to their website to register for my own app.

The registration process was smooth, and soon they gave me my app id which has 64 case-sensitive alpha-numeric characters.

64 Frigging Characters.

A quick calc tells me that is roughly “5,164,973,859,965,250,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000″ combinations possible.

That is even more roughly 5.1 × 10¹¹⁴

Do you know what is less than that? No. of Atoms in observable universe, number of atoms in whole frigging observable universe my dear blog reader, which btw are roughly 10⁸⁰, are less than the number of applications that Yahoo is hoping to create. For the curious out there, the observable universe contains anywhere between 30 to 70 billion trillion stars.

May be they REALLY want to make sure that no one guesses away the app id. I am not sure why they bother to go even way beyond GUID limits to come up with these freakishly large appIDs, I mean who are we competing with here? Some aliens trying to steal away my apps by guessing the appIDs? Huh!

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Jon @ Peltiertech has taken a critical look at the partition charts suggested yesterday. You can read his review of the partition charts here. One of the commenters on his site said,

Jon, the partition chart is not that bad. It just needs to be defragmented…

So I de-fragmented my partition chart, this time it no longer provides any spatial trend cues or anything, instead its a cool little replacement for a pie chart, more so when you have just 3-4 pies and got bored of looking at pies.

Here is how in just 3 steps you can do this type of de-fragmented partition chart

1. First create a grid where the chart can appear

This is the easy step, select a range of cells (preferably in multiples of 100, I took 300 cells, spaced over 25 columns, 12 rows) and adjust the row-height and column-width till the range looks fine enough. Take a look at this one on the right.

2. Now set the Conditional Format over the range

Lets say you want to show 3 pies, one for 30%, another for 48% and the last one for 32% (well, just kidding, you can only 110% of your work, not 110% of your pies) so 22%. The conditional formatting formulas can look like this:

Your formulas should look like this:


if cell's row-number * width + column-number is with in pie-1's range, turn the cell on to color-1
else if cell's rownumber * width + column-number is with in pie-2's range, turn the cell on to color-2
else turn the color-3 on


3. Remember to trash your pie charts

Well, not really, save the good old pies. There is no step 3. So I saved you … umm… 33% of work. So why dont you leave a comment and tell me what you think about this ?

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Next time you had to create a pie chart, consider building a partition chart as these charts can reveal trend information along with how much each pie is contributing. What more? They are as easy to create as eating a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream

I made a sample partition chart based on some random data, the trick lies in using conditional formatting to change the color of a rectangular range of cells based on our data. Just follow these 3 steps to create a neat looking partition chart.

1. First get the data you want to show in partition chart

The data should be in a table format. A sample dataset can be, your top selling product in each of the 100 cities for the last 48 months.

2. Create a grid where you can plat your partition chart

Now create an identical grid beneath the data table where we can plot our data chart. You can adjust column / row heights for this range until it looks like a blank canvas where you can plot the partition colors, something that looks like this.

Remember: the grid dimensions should be same as our data table in Step 1

3. Finally apply conditional formatting to the grid

This should be easy step, even if you are not a rock star of conditional formatting,

Specify conditions for each partition, Sample this:

That is all, you have a partition chart in front of you using which you can probe and analyze spatial trends.

Also: Art with charts, 73 FREE Downloadable Excel Chart templates

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I was doing some weird analysis on corporate mission statements and I had to count the number of words in each cell. That is when I realized there is no formula to calculate the number of words in a cell, I was too lazy to write an UDF for that, so I figured out a nearly perfect way to calculate no. of words in a cell using existing formulas.

If you want to calculate the no. of words in cell a1, then use the formula:
=len(a1)-len(substitute(a1," ",""))+1

What this does is, it calculates the number of spaces in a cell and adds 1 to it, thus almost finding the number of words in a cell. I say almost because, if a cell has “this blog rocks,really!”, this formula will calculate the words as 3, where as there are 4 words in there

But that is for you to think

Also: Concatenate a bunch of cells using simple formula, Generate tag clouds in excel using vba, Master your IFs and BUTs

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same flower, another angle, originally uploaded by Chandoo.

We went to near by Scioto River park last weekend to spend some time without any noise. But we didnt know that there was a concert going on there. So we walked out of the park to surrounding Dublin residential area and I spotted few nice flowers en route. I am sucker for flowers, I cant control my finger when I see one, I had to click. May be because they are already beautiful, my shots are bound to be nice Whatever may be the reason, enjoy the shot.

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…

Ok, stop scratching, you might loose more hair than the common sense brand managers at vodafone lost.

Apparently these adds convey that Vodafone has solved the unsolvable conundrum of “talk-time” or “validity” by introducing a lifetime valid pre-paid card that also gives unlimited talk time. Wow, certainly a good move given the difficult choice pre-paid cell phone customer has to make by selecting one of “more talk time, less validity”, “less talk time more validity” and “mediocre talk time and mediocre validity”.

But Vodafone choose the most cryptic way to communicate this message across. They created visuals that have very little text and complicated meanings that I am sure not many pre-paid customers can comprehend. Anyone looking at zebra and thinking “is it white lines on dark skin” or “dark lines on white skin” and then immediately correlating that with “talk-time” or “validity” all while controlling the temptation to skip that page (containing the ad) in the magazine / news paper has my kudos.

what do you think? Should brands challenge people intellectually or just indulge in simple and easy to understand messages?

Also see earlier rants on Vodafone and Hutch: vodafone pug, Hutch Hindi ads

PS: Images are from AgencyFaqs

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