12 Steps to learn Excel and become awesome @ work in 2018
Obviously, everywhere you look this week, you find advice on how to do better this year.
Well, you don’t have to wait for a new year to become awesome at your work, any day is new year for the rest of your life.
So, today I want to share 12 steps to learn Excel and becoming awesome. But first I have a secret to confess…,
I think becoming awesome in Excel useless.
What we really want is, to become awesome in our work. Since we spend a lot of time using Excel (and other office software), knowing how to use these better can have a huge impact on how we do our work.
In that spirit, lets look at 12 steps to learn Excel so you become awesome in your work.
60 sports in six charts
On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.
First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.
Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts
We all know that learning a few keyboard shortcuts can speedup your Excel game. Most pro users rely on a handful shortcuts when working with large spreadsheets. But when it comes to charting, we automatically reach for mouse. But do you know that you can use few simple shortcuts to do most day to day chart related things?
Ready for top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel charts? Read on.
Visualizing Commonwealth games performance – Interactive chart
The 2018 edition of Commonwealth games are on for a week now. Both of my homes – India and New Zealand have been doing so well. Naturally, I wanted to gather games data and make something fun and creative from it. Here is my attempt to amuse you on this Friday.
Looks interesting? Want to know how to make something like this on your own? Then read on…
Histograms & Pareto charts in Excel – tutorial, tips and downloadable template
Time for some statistics and charting fun. Let’s learn all about histograms and Pareto charts in Excel 2016. You will learn
- What, why and when?
- How to set up and customize histograms
- How to use Pareto charts?
- How to create dynamic histograms?
- Creating histograms in old Excel (2013 or prior versions)
Sounds interesting? Let’s get started then.
Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]
Game for some charting awesomeness?
Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.
Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?
How about the one above?
Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.
Employee Performance Panel Charts – Excel vs. R [video]
Recently, I had to make a bunch of panel charts. After wrangling with Excel (and a tiny bit of VBA) to create them, I wondered if we are suffering needlessly by being too loyal to Excel. I switched to R and could create these panel charts in almost no time (well, first I had to learn how to pivot the data using dplyr). Today, let me share the experience.