Archive for December, 2009

Ah, you thought I will let you go to the next decade without a “year in review” post? No so fast my friend, not so fast.

[This post is a bit long by our standards, but full of gooey excel goodness. So get a cup of coffee or choco and get going]

And if you are in a rush, here is my wish – Happy New Year 2010 🙂

Excel is very good for keeping track of your investments. Due to its grid nature, you can easily create a table of all the mutual fund holdings and monitor the latest NAVs (Net Asset Values) to see how your investments are doing. A while back we have posted a file on tracking mutual funds using excel. Today we are going to release an upgrade for that file.

Read the rest of this post to understand how this template works and download the free template.

Lets celebrate these holidays in PHD Style. By learning few excel formulas that you can use to find out dates for some of the popular public holidays like – labor day, memorial day etc. When is Labor Day (US) in 2010? Labor day (the US variant) is celebrated on first Monday of every September. It […]

Christmas and New year have always been a magical time for us. Even though we end up being in 2 different countries for most of the Christmases, we always cherish the time. It has a special romantic significance too, I proposed to Jo shortly after new year in 2001 (and did it almost everyday until […]

Have you ever wondered how to print excel sheets in one page across? so that when you print a large excel spreadsheet the output can be read one page after another. We can use the print settings in Excel to do this very easily. In this episode of quick tips we will learn how to do this with in 5 seconds.

It is not everyday that a blog boasts of 1000th post. After blogging for 1999 days ie 5 years 5 months 24 days, finally, this is my thousandth post.

While this is not a real mile stone or anything, I want to use this post to say thanks. Without you, this mile stone means nothing to me. 🙂

Comparing values is one of the main reasons we make charts. Yesterday we have a post on using thermometer charts to quickly compare actual values with targets. Today we follow up the post with 10 charting ideas you can use to compare actual values with targets. Check out how bullet charts, thermometer charts, traffic lights, gauges, column charts, area charts can help you compare targets with actual performances. A review of best charting options when you need to compare.

Read the rest of the post to see the options and participate in poll.

Comparing values is one of the reasons why we make charts. So today I am going to teach you a handy little trick to make a thermometer like chart to compare targets with actuals. This type of chart is very useful when you have a bunch of sales targets and you want to measure how the performance has been.

We all know how to make comments on excel documents, just select the cell where you want a comment, press SHIFT+F2 and make the comment. But the comments are only visible when you open the workbook. What if you want to print out an excel file, but include all the comments as well?

Turns out you can do that with a hidden option in excel page setup.

Have you ever wondered how you can hide that 0 (zero) at axis bottom? Like shown beside. You can use custom cell formatting codes (or custom number formatting codes) to do just that. Just go to axis formatting and from the number tab set the axis number format to something like #,##0;-#,##0;; Read the rest of the post to learn more.

Here is a 2010 new year gift to all our readers – a free 2010 calendar excel file (a little secret: just change the year in “outline” sheet from 2010 to 2011, to get the next years calendar. It works all the way up to year 9999). You can even get a Printable PDF Calendar. There are 14 different sheets in the calendar file. First one is an outline calendar for the entire year. The next 12 are monthly calendars. And the last sheet shows a mini-calendar for the year 2010.

Read the rest of this post to know more and download the calendar.

In office 2007 (and 2010) you can immediately collapse the ribbon by pressing CTRL+F1. Thanks to Loranga for sharing this tip. More ribbon goodness | Free e-book to learn Excel Ribbon

Often when you need to generate a sample from large data set, you may want to pick data from a random date. In such cases, you can use excel’s RAND() and RANDBETWEEN() formulas to pick a random date. Here I have included few examples,

Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.

The workbook is full of lessons on conditional formatting, cell formatting, using formulas. Go ahead and download it today.

Dilbert is my favorite cartoon (Calvin & Hobbes comes second). I like it so much that I have named this blog after Dilbert. So, today, as as ode to Dilbert and all things excel, we present you… Dilbert on Excel. Read the rest of this post to find some great dilbert strips on excel modeling, formulas, errors and annoyances. Have a fun weekend.