Archive for September, 2008

In our Utopian imaginations all the data would have been standardized and shareable across systems and people. But alas, the reality is totally different. We seldom get data in the format / way we desire it to be. In other words, the ingredients are all there, but for us to prepare the dinner, you must […]

Saturday we were in no mood to cook, we were feeling all tired up after roaming in Seattle. So we ordered pizza from dominos pizza website. The ordering process is simple and straight forward. But what awed me most is the pizza tracker. Once you place the order they show you this pizza tracker: That […]

Time for sharing another round of excel related articles around the web. List of all data visualization and analysis excel add-ins, The list includes some of the really useful add-ins. Handy bookmark if you work with data visualization alot and need to know where to find good stuff to add to your excel capabilities. Designing […]

Shot in our apartment complex in Columbus. One of the houses had these on the yard and they are just beautiful. I am sucker for flowers and had to shoot when I come across one. More flowers for your eyes. More clicks

I love google maps. No, wait, I really love google maps. I think it is a perfect example of passion, intelligence and wit coming together to create software. [trivia link: google maps tells you swim across the ocean], I have been using maps to find transit directions from my hotel to office and I have […]

Dont think of me as a perverted spreadsheet user, I like visualizations in any form or shape. There is so much data even about human relationships like love and sex. This article shows 10 of the most visually beautiful and insightful of the infographics on sex and love. Click on the titles above images to […]

I am coffee drinker. And I love various types of coffee; be it the Chennai strong filter coffee or the medium-blend of Starbucks, I just love to sip a cupfull every morning. Since I love coffee so much I thought why not share a little secret about coffee buying with you all. Assuming you buy […]

Spelling mistakes are a thing of day to day carporate life. Most of the data in spreadsheets is entered by people and hence prone to having spelling mistakes or alternate spellings. For eg. a person named John could have been spelled as Jon. And when John calls you back to confirm his reservation and you […]

In shuffling a list of items in excel I have described the technique of using random numbers generated by RAND() to sort a list of items. The technique had one disadvantage though, every time you need to reshuffle the list you have to press F9 to recalculate the rand() and then go to menu > […]

Gmail Labs constantly introduces new features that make using Gmail much more productive. Recently they introduced 2 new features – Mark as Read button and Auto suggest for label search which I find extremely useful. Mark as read is really useful since I use it often to get to inbox zero. I am obsessed with […]

Often when you are working on 2 incompatible systems and try to import data from one to another, excel can be a handy tool. I have used excel plenty of times to generate SQL insert / update statements which I could later execute on the database console. Here is a tutorial if you ever have […]

As mentioned earlier we have moved to Seattle this Sunday. It seems like a great place already. Just that everything is more expensive than we are used to in Columbus. But I guess that is the premium we have to pay for being in a big city. On to this week’s edition of excellent excel […]

Last week we have been to Pittsburgh to visit a college friend. We had great fun there. It is a neat little town with countless bridges. Pittsburgh was historically known as steel city, but today the glory is all that of technology and education industries there. The above is the building of a steel company […]

The new Microsoft “Hi, I am PC” ads are supercool. Apple has been making fun of PC (and PC users) for while with the “I am PC, I am Mac” ads and the response from MS advertising team is nothing short of brilliant. With these simple & funny ads, they have changed the focus from […]

Thankfully power is back in Ohio, almost 2 days ago to my house. There is another personal update: We are moving to Seattle. My consulting work in Columbus was over 2 weeks back and since then I have been waiting for the next assignment. Finally this week it became clear that we have to move […]