Archive for July, 2008

For the first time since starting this blog, I have crossed 500 RSS Subscribers today. Exactly an year ago, this blog had a small number of 25 readers and today the count reached to 505, with over a hundred of them reading updates through email. I am very happy to find this many passionate readers […]

Time for another round of cool charting / info-graphic ideas around the web. Most Popular Baby Names – all the way from 1880 Nametrends is a cool website totally dedicated to analyzing and showing baby name trends. They have pretty interesting stuff like, how baby names ending with -lie (charlie, willie, ellie etc.) fared from […]

RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs. If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like: Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites […]

Wow, this is totally cool. A great lesson in creating buzz. The folks at windows vista wanted to convince people that Vista is indeed a good operating system and upgradable from XP. But there are lot of bad opinions floating around and end users are more or less confused about it. Personally I have rarely […]

Here is a quick round up of excel posts from few of the awe some blogs around the web: At PTS Blog, Jon provides excellent tutorial on adding target lines to your bar charts to show target vs. actual performance. He has several other tweaks for your category axis as well, just read the other […]

– During formula typing, adjusts the reference type, abs to relative, otherwise repeats last action + – Inserts current date +

When I was in school we had a maths teacher named BVN. He used to teach advanced math (like trigonometry, calculus) for class 7 onwards. We used to fear him a lot because he is the strictest of them all. Finally when I got to seventh I met him as a teacher. And boy, he […]

Here is a quick Monday tip for data junkies. If you want to shuffle a list of numbers or cells in excel in random order you can do that with “data > sort” menu option of excel. First insert a column next to the list you want to shuffle and enter random numbers in each […]

Dear Microsoft (and other guys who design software that can be used to write something): Blog is a real word, just like bog or bloc or blot or blow or blob. So please add it to your esteemed dictionaries and stop harassing everyone with the wiggly red lines. Of course you can blame me for […]

Yesterday evening I have suddenly realized that I don’t have any photos to post for today edition of Photographic Fridays, I didn’t want this category to be a still born like the erstwhile Calvin fund 😀 So I took out the D40 and marched out of house in search a subject worth my clickitch. While […]

Do you know that you can mute conversations in gmail if you are do not want to see that lengthy thread on single subjected that people wont give up. Just select the mail / conversation you want to mute Click on “More actions” and select “mute” Enjoy the bliss If you want search for muted […]

Starting this week I will post cool infographics from around the web, 4-5 of them a week to inspire , to give more ideas on presenting information and to provide some eye candy for awesome readers @ Pointy Haired Dilbert. Go ahead, click through these awesome graphics: California Walkability Score Heat Map Lee Byron took […]

I have noticed something totally strange while trying to get an auto insurance quote online at GEICO. See it for yourself. They are showing your password in the URL… OMG 😮 Make sure you don’t use the site for getting new quotes as it could be a potential privacy breach as anyone watching the URLs […]

Often my work involves processing web page data in excel sheets. This includes extracting the hyperlinks from cell contents. There is no formula for extracting hyperlinks though, you can right click on cell and choose “edit hyperlink” to see which address the cell is linking to. But that is a tedious process especially if you […]

change-sort-orientation-excel-columns You can sort data across columns instead of rows by changing sort options. If you ever had to sort across columns now you know a simple way to do this 🙂 Follow these steps for changing sort orientation: Select the table you want to sort (just the data, not the headers as when you […]