Save time with custom ribbons in Excel [tutorial]
A significant portion of our time in Excel is spent navigating between various ribbon tabs and clicking buttons. Wouldn’t it be better if you can combine all the frequently used features in to one ribbon? Something like above:
Read on to learn how to create, edit and share custom ribbons in Excel.
CP039: May the FOR Loop be with you – Introduction to For Loops in Excel VBA
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In the 39th session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s learn about FOR loops.
There is a special giveaway in this podcast. It is a workbook with several FOR loop VBA code examples. Listen to the episode for instructions.
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- Announcements
- What is a loop – plain English & technical definitions
- For Loop vs. other kind of loops (While & Until)
- For Next loops
- For Each loops
- Nested For loops
- Special tips on For loops
- Performance issues & infinite loops
- Conclusions & giveaway
Quickly filter a table by combination of selected cell values using VBA
Filtering is one of the most used feature in Excel. It is a quick way to take lots of data and narrow down to the subset we want.
But here is one common filtering scenario that is slow as snail.
Imagine you are looking at some sort of sales data (if you can’t imagine, look at the above demo).
Now, you want to filter this list for gender=male, profession=self-employed, product category = chocolates and quantity = 1.
If you use the right click, filter > filter by selected value approach, this will take several clicks.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you can select the entire combination and say filter?
Unfortunately, no such feature exists in Excel.
But you are not aiming to be ordinary in Excel. You are aiming to be awesome in Excel. That means, you don’t take no for answer.
Fortunately, we can quickly write a VBA macro that filters a list by selection. So let’s do that.
Excel Links – PASS BA 2015 Edition
In about 3 days, I am leaving to USA for participating in PASS Business Analytics conference – 2015. It is an annual event for people in analytics profession. This is the first time I am attending & speaking at the event. I am so excited for many reasons.
- I will be meeting many Excel bloggers, authors & internet friends for the first time
- I will be meeting many of you (readers, listeners, followers & customers of Chandoo.org) too
- I will be speaking at an awesome conference
- I will be visiting San Francisco for the first time in life
- I will be meeting a few college friends too
All this excitement means, I have too much going on. But that shouldn’t leave you out . So here are a few awesome Excel links for you. Check out and learn.
Conditionally Format Chart Backgrounds
Learn two techniques to conditionally format the background of a chart based on some external value.
Celebrate Holi with this colorful Excel file
Today is Holi, the festival of colors in India. It is a fun festival where people smear each other with colors, water balloons, tomatoes and sometimes rotten eggs. This year we wanted to play with only water guns, but kids vetoed that idea vehemently. So we ended up driving to my sister-in-law’s place to play with colors (there were no rotten eggs or tomatoes, thankfully).
Let me smear a few colors on you
I would love to splash a jug full of color water on you and say Happy Holi. But the internets have not advanced thus far. So I am going to give you the next best option.
An Excel workbook to play holi
How to consolidate data that is different shapes [BYOD]
Last week, I asked my email newsletter readers to submit “one data analysis problem you are struggling with”. We called it BYOD – Bring your own data. More than 100 people have emailed various interesting (and often very difficult) problems. This week (between 16th of February to 20th of February), let’s take a look at some of these problems and solve them.
Consolidating data in different shapes
We can use either VBA or Excel’s consolidation features to combine data that has same shape (ie same number & type of columns). Here is one way to do it.
But what if we need to consolidate data that is in different shapes?
Something like above.
In such cases, we can use 3 powerful tools.
- Multiple Consolidation Ranges – Pivot Tables
- VBA
- Power Query
So let’s examine how to use these approaches to consolidate data in different shapes.