Archive for November, 2009

Most of us use chart formatting options to change the way grid-lines, data series, labels, axis, titles, plot areas look. Chart formatting is one of the areas where people spend most time. Today I want to teach you a quick productivity hack to speed up chart formatting. In excel 2007 and above, when you click […]

Just a quick update, I am extending the visualization challenge #2‘s dead line to 5th Dec. This will give time to our members in US as they are busy celebrating thanksgiving day. Go here for details about the contest, if you win, you will get a cool iPod Touch, sponsored by Zoho Reports. PS: Have […]

It is very usual for retailers to offer huge discounts and offers during thanksgiving, to celebrate the onset of Christmas shopping season. In that spirit, I am announcing PHD thanksgiving sale. The sale is open from now to 26th December, 2009.

If you have already purchased something from me in the last 30 days (that is since 25th October, 2009): You are still eligible for these deals. Just reply to the “purchase confirmation” e-mail I sent you when you bought the stuff and I will give you the offer…

Every year, on 4th Thursday of November, folks in US celebrate Thanksgiving day. A similar holiday exists in Canada too, they celebrate it on Second Monday of Every October.We will celebrate thanksgiving in PHD style, by sharing a wacky formula tip.

Today, we are going to learn how to use excel formulas to find out thanksgiving day’s date for any year.

We interrupt usual routine of excel and charting tutorials to present the first ever readership survey on PHD. In fact, there are so few questions that to call it a survey would be an insult to other surveys, but I digress.

I want you to take few seconds and fill out this very simple form. Just type in whatever comes to your mind, honest and simple stuff. The survey is below, if you are not able to see it in RSS reader or email client, please go to http://bit.ly/phd-survey.

At PHD household, we believe in using money wisely. Both Mrs. PHD and I come from very modest backgrounds. Our upbringing has taught us value of money in the most effective way – by exposing us to not having any. So when we got our first job (did I tell you that both Jo and I started working in same company and sat in same floor? Oh, it was such a lovely time), we were very prudent and decided not to waste money on anything trivial (we still are, just that over last 6 years our earning capacity increased a bit and we became parents).

Anyways, I am not here to bore you about my household. But I am here to tell you fun ways to track expenses and household budgets using spreadsheets.

Today I want to introduce Excel 2010 to you. Excel 2010 is the latest version of spreadsheet software from Microsoft, set to be released for sale in late 2010. On Nov 18th, MS released the public beta of Excel 2010 [download here] along with other Office productivity software.

Excel 2010 has several improvements compared to earlier version – Excel 2007. In this post, I want to highlight some of the User Interface improvements made in Excel 2010 that are very exciting and fun to use.

As of yesterday, the project management templates have crossed 100 customer milestone. That is right my friend, one hundred project managers have chosen to manage their projects better using our templates. I have asked our customers to share their feedback and this is what they say: I think that the templates are excellent. A million […]

Here is a simple yet novel use of formulas. Let us say you have a list of values in range A1:A5 and you want to reverse the list. In an empty cell write =INDEX($A$1:$A$5,6-ROWS($A$1:A1)) and copy down. Boom, you get the reversed list. Here is how the formula works: In the reversed list, first item […]

Finally the public beta of Office 2010 is out. Go to Office Beta site and download the installation today. Make sure you select the “custom” installation option and choose to “keep the old versions”, otherwise the beta will upgrade your office installation. (Beta installation expires by October 2010) Here is a brief list of new […]

Transposing rows and columns in a table is one of the most useful tricks when you are pasting data. Yet, it always surprises me that very few people actually know this. So here it is…

Do you know you can group dates in pivot tables to show the report by week, month or quarter? I have learned this trick while doing analysis on a pivot table today. In this online lesson on pivot tables, I will teach you how to group dates in pivot tables to analyze the data by month, week, quarter or hour of day.

Over the weekend I spent some time to update the Excel Dashboards page. It now features more articles, downloads and resources for those of you making Excel Dashboards. Go ahead and check out the page here and let me know your feedback.

Moving on to this weeks excel and charting links worth checking.

This week’s poll is very simple. What is the the most embarrassing charting mistake your made?

For me it has to be that one time when I made a sports dashboard using excel. I have adjusted the axis scale of a bar chart so that my favorite cricket player (Sachin Tendulkar, who else?)’s records are emphasized. In a matter of minutes I have received several comments from all over world pointing out the mistake. Even though, the intention was to highlight the achievements of master blaster, the axis adjustment was obviously a mistake.

Aravind (@arvindnatarajan on twitter) who works at Zoho emailed me earlier today and asked if Zoho Reports – Online Reporting and Business Intelligence Service, can sponsor our visualization challenge #2.