Archive for February, 2010

Dear Readers & Friends, I am very happy to announce that Excel School online training program is now available for your consideration. Please read this short post to understand what you will get when you sign-up for this program and how you can join. What will you get when you join? Access to Private Member-only […]

I have very exciting news for you. Finally, the excel school program is ready for your consideration. We are opening registration on 8th of Feb. (if you don’t know what Excel school is… it is a 12 week online excel training program, conducted by me. You can find full details, get a free lesson here.) […]

Let us take a minute and bask in some glory, for, our little community at PHD had the most fantastic month ever. That is right, January 2010 is so far the best month since I started blogging. We have broken all sorts of previous records on content, conversations, connections, traffic and revenue. In January, we […]

With this post we are starting a new series on how to do basic accounting in Microsoft Excel. In this and next 5 posts, we will aim to setup Profit & Loss account reporting for multi-location retail company.

During this series we will learn how to make P&L reports on various criteria with just few clicks.

Many users find it difficult to manage their P&L reporting for Multi Location organization.

We will be using Pivot Tables for our reporting purpose and will take example of a Retails chain with multiple locations divided into various regions.

Okay, this is a cop-out, but I have been busy and not-in-a-mood-for-writing in the last 2 days. (I don’t know, but I feel a bit low, may be it is all the snow around and constant work due to excel school and day job).

So, let us have an open thread on Excel Shortcuts. I will start by listing down all the excel keyboard shortcuts I use regularly,

Here is a typical scenario: We want to allow only one of the pre-defined customer names in our spreadsheet. We have listed down all the customers in column B and want excel to check against this list and validate the data. But there are 3 problems. (1) Our list is not sorted alphabetically (2) It contains duplicates and (3) The list comes from external source, so we can not remove duplicates and sort the list every time.

Now how can we set up a simple data validation list that would not repeat customer names and shows them in sorted order like this.

Read the rest of this guest post by Hui to learn how to use data validation in creative new ways.

Welcome to another edition of excel links. During the last week, I have revised excel downloads page on PHD and now it contains over 75 excel templates, tutorial downloads. I am not sure if you dig the new format of the page though. So go take a look at it and let me know what […]