Last week I have reviewed Google’s flu trends chart and told you that is it is very well made. Out of curiosity I made a similar chart in Excel. In this post, I am going to share the experience and results with you. Interested? Read on…

Most of you already know that using the REPT formula along with pipe (”|”) symbol, we can make simple in-cell charts in excel. For eg. =REPT(”|”,10) looks like a bar chart of width 10.
Despite the simplicity, most people don’t use in-cell charts because these charts don’t look anything like their counterparts. But you can overcome [...]

Today we will build a mortgage payment calculator (and amortization schedule) using excel. But we will not build a boring excel sheet, we will build a mortgage calculator that is easy to play with.

A mortgage payment is a monthly installment that you pay towards a loan. Any mortgage loan will typically have, (1) loan amount, (2) duration of the loan in years, (3) interest rate per year

Given these 3 parameters, we can easily determine the monthly installment amount (this will be the same amount for all months during loan tenure)

We are going to use Excel’s form controls (more on this below) to build a mortgage payment calculator like this.

Today we will learn to use Excel’s LEFT and FIND formulas. But what fun it is to learn a new formula on a Tuesday?
So, we will actually learn to use these formulas to solve the problem: “extract the username from an email ID”
How is an email ID structured?
Any email ID contains 2 parts – user [...]

Finally, our second visualization challenge comes to an end. We got a winner.
Background about Zoho Reports Visualization Challenge:
(skip this section if you know what I am going to say)
Back in November, 2009, I have asked the readers to come up with best possible ways to visualize a set of fictitious sales data. The objective is [...]

Ok, I need some quick feedback here. For the last few months I have been thinking and planning to launch an online excel training program. And I want to know if YOU are interested in one. Read the rest of this post if you are curious.

There is nothing awesome about flu. In fact, it is anti-awesome if you have flu. I have been fortunate enough not to get it ever (it is another story that I have cold almost 364 days of an year).

Don’t worry if you are afraid of it, Folks at Google are not letting you down. They are using google search terms to predict flu trends and present the information in a beautiful chart.

Today I want to tell you why this particular chart on flu trends made by Google is awesome…