Spotted these two rather well done ads starring Dhoni. The ads glorify lungi-clad, wild-dancing, movie-loving Tamil spirit while promoting carbonated sweetened beverages and mechanized time indicators.

Dhoni Pepsi ad:

Dhoni Sonata ad:

However well done these ads are, I must admit that you will never probably see anything close to what is depicted in the ads anywhere in Chennai or Tamilnadu. Its time advertisers and brand managers took notice of the way people actually are.

I think this is brilliantly done, despite being a mac owner and lover, the ad just looked perfect without sounding arrogant or stupid. Good work Lenevo

Would you like to spend next 5 minutes learning how to create an excel sheet to track your mutual fund portfolio?

NOTE: I have updated the sheet to fix a formula error, download it again if you need to.

We will use 2 simple excel features to achieve this - web queries and vlookup()
[click here to learn more about web queries in excel]

1. First, lets put a tabular format for our portfolio: We can have fund name, # of units, purchase NAV (Net Asset Value, the cost of unit for your when you bought it), purchase date, total value at purchase (units * purchase NAV), current NAV (we will pull this data from internet), value as of now (units * current NAV), Profit / loss amount and profit / loss % as our table columns. Once you learn how to do this, you can add more columns depending on what / how you want to track your MF portfolio.

   When you finish creating the table, it would look something like this:
   

2. Next, we will use web-queries to load the fund-names and the corresponding latest NAVs in a separate sheet. I have queried Association of Mutual Funds India [AMFI] - Latest Mutual fund NAV page since all my investments are in India. If you are in US or some other country you can query corresponding fund house / financial info aggregator sites (like google finance) to get the data. Remember to set “Refresh data on file open” on to get fresh data whenever you open the your tracker excel sheet.

   Since AMFI returns data in a text file with ; as delimiter, I had to parse the fund names and navs out of it using a combination of search(), left() and mid(). I will not get in to the details of how its done since you may have to process your data differently depending on source.

   Finally when the processing is done, we will have a table in the second sheet with all fund names and latest navs.

3. Now, all we have to do is create lookup formulas (well just vlookup()) to get the latest NAV to our tracker table based on the entered fund name.
   • Assuming the fund name in which you invested is in cell “c1″,
   • Assuming the fund data is in table “sheet1!c1:d6000″ with “column c” containing the fund name and “column d” containing latest NAV,

   The formula for latest NAV can look like this:
   
=vlookup(c1,sheet1!c1:d6000,2,false)

   Remember to use false for last parameter since fund names may not be sorted in alphabetical order on your source web page.

   Now we will repeat this formula for all the rows in latest nav column. I have built my portfolio tracker to track 20 funds at a time. Also, you can simplify formulas using named ranges.

4. Finally we will write formulas for,

   current value = latest nav * units held
   profit/loss = current value - purchase value
   profit/loss % = “profit/loss” / purchase value

   You can add some conditional formatting to beautify the table (like turning text blue for profits and red for losses etc.)

5. Thats all, you have now created a real-time mf portfolio tracker. It would look something like this when done:
   
   You can do the same for stock portfolios, commodities etc. You just need a web source that gives you latest data and five minutes of free time

Feel free to download mutual fund portfolio tracker excel sheet I have created and play with it.

Few ideas on how you can enhance this:

• Add graphs to see visually how the funds are doing
• Build some VBA to store previous NAV values of your funds so that you can see historical dates
• Instead of doing plain % of profit / loss, compute realistic growth of your funds using date of purchase, risk free rate of return etc.

Here is a simple to trick to beat the 56 color limitation in excel when you are designing a chart: use picture files (jpg, gif, png etc.) to fill the chart area.

You will no longer have to worry about limiting your project report / website / annual report etc. colors to the 56 that excel has.

1 + 3 steps to get more colors in excel charts:

1. First create a 1*1 pixel sized image of the color you want to use in excel. You can use any software like MS Paintbrush to do this, all you need is the hex code or rgb of the color you want. Visit colour lovers if you are looking for cool color ideas.
2. Right click on any of your chart data points and select format data point
   
3. In the dialog select “fill effects”
   
4. Finally, go to “Picture” tab in fill effects and specify your picture file path.
   
   OK your changes. Thats all, now your charts have any color your want.

Also: Download 73 beautiful excel chart templates | Art of excel charting | Become a conditional formatting pro

Its that time of the year again, April first, the fools day, when folks working at Google get creative and make a joke that is totally crazy and back it up with research that sounds authentic. This just proves that when you are passionate about something, you end up having tons of fun. This year they have created “google custom time” feature according to which your email can travel back in time and reach the receiver’s inbox before it was, all using e-flux capacitors and such like

Happy fools day

Other Google April fool jokes : Gmail Paper (2007) | Google TiSP Free WiFi | Gmail Infinite Plus one

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How many times you created a chart in Microsoft excel and formatted it for minutes (and sometimes hours) to reduce the eye-sore?

Well, I will tell you my answer, its 293049430493 times

Worry not! for you can become a charting superman (or elastigirl) by using these 73 free designer quality chart templates in literally no time (well, almost)

These templates will take care of typical formatting activities like,

• Remove that ugly Grey color background from the chart
• Change the default grid line format from intrusive solid black to a duller shade of dotted Grey
• Adjust the fonts (to verdana in this case), remove annoying chart auto-font-scaling
• Move the legend to a meaningful location and adjust its size
• And, ofcouse, fix the colors

so that you, the user can focus on your data and not on “why in the world anyone would design a default format like this…”, so go ahead and unleash the charting pro in you.

Download the free MS Excel chart / graph templates

(I have put them in 3 separate excel sheets):

or, since you are so good, download one zip file, quick and easy!

If you are wondering how to use these templates, scroll all the way down the post

1. Bar / Column Chart Templates:

(29 of them)

2. Stacked Bar / Column Chart Templates:

(22 of them)

3. Pie Chart Templates:

(22 of them)
Even though I seldom use pie-charts (since they hide more than they show and all that) I know a lot of people do use them and hence here they are,

How to use these templates?

• Method 1 - Easy and Quick:
  • Download the chart templates (download links at top and bottom of this post)
  • Copy both the chart you wanted and the “data used” portion
  • Paste in your workbook
  • Change the values, remove columns (or add them if you wish)
  • Modify formatting if needed
  • Be careful now, as your boss may feel zealous for your charting skills
• Method 2: Slightly geeky but works like a charm!
  • Download the chart templates (download links at top and bottom of this post)
  • Select the chart you want, right click and select “Chart type” from the context menu
    [note: for more detailed steps & how-to, look in the excel worksheets you have downloaded
  • In the dailog, go to “custom types” tab and select “User-defined” radio button (towards bottom left)
  • Click on “Add…” button, and give your chart-template a name that you can remember
  • When you are done, click ok, and the chart is now added to your user-defined-charts library
  • In future, when you want to use the chart, simply click on charts icon on tool bar, and select the chart type as custom -> user defined ->your chart name
  • Now, watch out as your charts start stealing eyeballs in the boardroom!

Finally we can say good bye to default chart formats and all the associated eyesore

Download the free MS Excel chart / graph templates

(I have put them in 3 separate excel sheets):

or, since you are so good, download one zip file, quick and easy!

Thats all, feel free to share this content with your friends by bookmarking it on del.icio.us | Stumble upon

Transport for London’s new advertising campaign to increase the safety of cycle travel in London is pretty innovative, watch the ad here (totally safe for work, so go ahead and watch):

But there is another important lesson in the ad, as Seth Godin suggested, way too many marketers wanted us to count the passes and let us miss all the wonderful things on our way, how often the communication is so chaotic that you either count the passes or watch the bears instead of seeing the whole picture and getting a better experience out of it. Think!

More on the ad here : DOTHETEST