All articles with 'data validation' Tag

A while ago, we published a new year resolution template. This was a hit with our reader with thousands of you downloading it. During last week, Peppe, one of our readers from Italy, took this template and made it even more awesome.

The original template had tasks and completion check mark. As you finish each task, you can see the progress bar moving.

Peppe added priorities to this. With his new version, progress is measured based on how much priority we assigned that particular task. Pretty neat eh?!?

Here is a quick tip on removing data validation rules. We all know that data validation is a powerful feature in Excel to control what data is entered. But, sometimes, you may want to remove the rules from a set of cells. How would you do it? The normal approach is, Select the cells with [...]

Last week we saw a really cool holiday request form made by Theodor. This week, we will learn how to combine conditional formatting and data validation to create an awesome data entry form. First see a demo to understand what I mean: How to create such a data entry form? Very simple, just grab a [...]

This is a guest article by Matt, who works as a Business Analyst with allrecipes.com. He shares with us how he is using Excel to become a rockstar business analyst. In his own words,

“At Allrecipes.com we use excel for a variety of purposes. Analyzing site trends, forecasting traffic, charts, dashboards, and slide shows; you name it, we use excel for it. That’s why Chandoo’s tips have been so helpful – because we use excel every day. Thanks to chandoo.org, I’ve developed a reputation as an “excel wizard” and even taught a 4 week excel training class!“

Situation

Sometimes we don’t know what we want. If this happens when I am in a bar, I usually order a cocktail. Just a mix of everything. The same will work in Excel too.

For eg. If you have lots of data, but the value you want to look up needs to change based on whims and fancies of your users, then you can resort to a cocktail. A mix of VLOOKUP with Drop down lists (Data validation)

Read more to find how to solve this.

This is a guest post written by Paramdeep from Pristine. Chandoo.org is partnering with Pristine to bring an excel financial modeling online training program for you. This is Part 6 of 6 on Financial Modeling using Excel In this tutorial we are going to learn how to build assumptions & input sheets in our excel [...]

Ok, since excel school 3rd batch is going to open on 15th, I wasnt going to write anything today. I have slept just 4 hours last night, blame it on work (and that funny video on youtube). But I found 30 minutes free time, so here you go, a quick but delicious tip on making your data validation dynamic.

Dynamic Data Validation?!? What in the name of slice bread and peanut butter is that?

See the demo aside to understand and read on to master the trick.

While I was working Denmark, there is one thing I noticed. Danes are one hell of football lovers. The football (soccer) enthusiasm is over the top when there is a match between Denmark and Sweden. A common practice in many offices is a football pool. This is how it works: When there is a match [...]

In a recent consulting assignment I had a tricky data validation problem. The customer wanted to have an either-or condition in the data validation, like this: My initial reaction to this requirement was “hmm… that is not possible“. But before shooting the email back to client, I got curious and checked if excel data validation [...]

Often when we are making spreadsheets for forecasting or planning we would like to keep the starting month dynamic so that rest of the months in the plan can automatically rolled. Don’t understand? See this example: This type of setup is quite useful as it lets us change the starting month very easily. We can [...]

A panel chart (often called as trellis display or small-multiples) shows data for multiple variables in an easy to digest format. It lets users compare in any way and draw conclusions with ease.

Today, I want to discuss how the principles of panel chart can be applied to visualize a complex set of survey results. For this we will use the recent survey conducted by Gartner on how various customers use BI (Business Intelligence) tools.

In part 2 of Excel Dynamic Dashboard Tutorial, we will learn how to set up various dynamic charts that are part of the dashboard. We start with a simple dynamic pie chart that shows the sales distributions and then move on to sales trend line charts. These charts use various excel formulas to pull in the information based on user selection.

In October 2008, I have started an ambitious series of posts on this blog called – Spreadcheats. These are little tricks, nuggets, tutorials on using Excel that would make anyone a spreadsheet guru.

The spreadcheats series has been wildly successful. I am compiling all this useful information and articles in to one big post so that anyone can follow the links and become good in Excel. Read on,

[Note: This is not for beginners. If you know what a formula is, you would enjoy this 31 articles]

Here is a typical scenario: We want to allow only one of the pre-defined customer names in our spreadsheet. We have listed down all the customers in column B and want excel to check against this list and validate the data. But there are 3 problems. (1) Our list is not sorted alphabetically (2) It contains duplicates and (3) The list comes from external source, so we can not remove duplicates and sort the list every time.

Now how can we set up a simple data validation list that would not repeat customer names and shows them in sorted order like this.

Read the rest of this guest post by Hui to learn how to use data validation in creative new ways.

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…