Excel can be Exciting - 15 fun things you can do with your spreadsheet in less than 5 seconds

Who said Excel takes lot of time / steps do something? Here is a list of 15 incredibly fun things you can do to your spreadsheets and each takes no more than 5 seconds to do.
Happy Friday
1. Change the shape / color of cell comments

Just select the cell comment, go to draw [...]

Improve your in-cell charts with colors and negative values

In response to Making Incell charts better article, reader Tony mailed me an excel sheet in which he has modified the charts to display colors and negative values. This is pretty cool. Take a look at the chart below:

The trick lies in displaying the charts in 2 rows, one for positive values and another for [...]

Formatting numbers in excel - few tips

Reader Nikhil Shah asks in an email:
Dear Chandoo,
I have some Error In Excel sheet.
Problem :-
I have a locker number 01234 567890, in Excel it will be displayed as 01234 567890 with the space. However if it was entered as 01234567890, Excel will display it as 1234567890, without the leading zero. If the data has [...]

Change cell formats with find-replace in excel

Do you know that you can use excel find - replace dialog to change cell formats?
Often we prepare a report or project plan and our boss or someone else in the team feels that all the red color cells need to change to blue or something similar, worry not, you can use find-replace (ctrl+h) to [...]

Custom Cell Formatting in Excel - Few Tips & Tricks

The other day I had to make an excel sheet for tracking all errors across one of the applications we are doing for our customer. The format was something like this,

We wanted to use a consistent message id format [4 digits: 0001, 0002, ... , 1000 etc.]. Now I do not want to type “0001″ [...]