Archive for March, 2014

Greetings and salutations, my fellow VBA-fearin’ congregation. Evangelizin’ Jeff here, spreading the good word about everlastin’ VBA serenity. You may remember me from mah preeeevious sermons such as Tables, PivotTables, and Macros: music to your ears and Big trouble in little spreadsheet. Well today, I’m going to praise the work of a high-yah pow-wah. Our […]

Howdy folks. Jeff Weir here again. You may remember me from posts such as What would James Bond have in his Personal Macro Workbook and my now infamous music review. Today – and this truly will be music to some ears – we’re going to concentrate more on the former and less on the latter. […]

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In the third session of Chandoo.org podcast, we are going to get BI curious. 😉

Not that kind you silly, We are talking about Business Intelligence, Big Data, Power Pivot & other Power BI family members. In this session, I am happy to feature Mike Alexander – Microsoft MVP, Author, Blogger & a good friend. Mike talks about how Excel is shaping the BI (Business Intelligence) revolution with advent of Power BI functionality.

You will learn,

• Introduction, what Mike is up to these days?
• What is BI, what does it mean to an average Excel analyst?
• What BI capabilities Excel has – brief intro to each of them
  • Power Pivot & what it does
  • Power Query & why it is important
  • Power View & how it works (and where it sucks)
  • Power Maps
• How to learn about these new technologies
  • Recommended Books
  • Websites
  • Courses
  • Live classes
• Special gift for our listeners

Last Friday, we had a fun little Excel challenge – Calculate Maximum Change. More than 170 people commented and shared their solutions to this problem.

And the best part?

The best part is the variety of solutions & thinking displayed by our community. So if you are one of those 170, puff your chest & pat yourself on the back. Go ahead, I will wait.

Today, lets take a look at some of these awesome formulas and understand how they work. Read on and watch the video you below to gain few awesomeness pounds.

Edit: WARNING…This is NOT a post on Excel No. Sorry ’bout that. Well, kinda sorry. To quote John Lydgate: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”. If you […]

Today, lets see how good your formula skills are.

Calculate maximum change

Can you calculate what is the maximum change in product sales between 2 months for above data?

Anyone running a small business knows the oozing bits of joy when you hear a customer saying, “Can you send me an invoice?”

While creating an invoice is an easy task, if you want something that is professional looking, easy to manage and works well, then you are stuck.

That is where Excel really shines. By using an invoice template, you can quickly create and send invoices.

Today I want to share one such template with you all. Why? Because we are awesome like that.

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In the second session of Chandoo.org Podcast, We will be learning how to use 5 Excel lookup functions.

What is in this session?
In this session, we tackle one of the most important areas of Excel. The lookup functions.

You will learn,

• Why lookup functions are necessary
• 5 Important lookup functions in Excel – VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, LOOKUP, MATCH & INDEX
• When & how to use each of these 5 functions?
• Extreme scenarios:
  • What happens when the value you are looking up is not there?
  • What if too many items match the lookup value?
  • What if you have too many conditions in the lookup criteria?
• Using IFERROR function
• Re-cap of the new powers you acquired
• 4 Resources for you to learn lookup functions better

One of the most useful features of Excel is formula help box. You know the little yellow box that appears as soon as you start typing a formula in a cell. I use this all the time to understand what the syntax of a particular function is, what parameters to pass etc.

Although I love it, sometimes it does get in the way when writing formulas. Because the help box sits on top of my data, often I find it hard to know which cell to link to.

Solution?!?

Simple. Use your mouse to move away the help box wherever you want.

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Chandoo.org Podcast is here….

Friends, fans & supporters of Chandoo.org,

I am so happy to add another dimension to our website. Chandoo.org podcast is finally here. You can listen to the inaugural episode by using the audio player above.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx

We don’t have a dog (yet), but we have a lot of books. Anytime I am in a bookshop, I feel like a mosquito in fat-camp. So you can imagine me smacking my lips when I saw your suggestions for favorite Excel books recently. There were more than 50 different books recommended by our readers. Of course I cannot buy all the 50 in one go. That would make Jo (my wife) angry. So I bought one that most of you recommended.

Ctrl + Shift + Enter by Mike Girvin

It is a book about array formulas, advanced formulas and data analysis techniques. I am eagerly waiting for the delivery to devour it. Once I am done with it, I will post a review here.

What about you? What Excel book are you reading now? Please share in comments.

Hi folks,

I am super-excited to tell you that Chandoo.org Podcast will be launching on 6th of March (Thursday). First episode is already recorded and I am getting ready for the big launch.

Name of the podcast

Last week I asked you what should we call our podcast. And I got more than 250 suggestions (150+ thru comments another 100 thru email). While the suggestions ranged from funny (chanpoo, addict.xls) to word plays (Excelent cast, Lord of the cells, Speaking Cells) to outright brilliant (XL.AM remember AM radio?). Some of the suggestions were crazy too: Word on the sheet, YouChandooIt, Didasko.xlsx – greek word “to impart knowledge”.

Thanks everyone for the ideas and suggestions.

A majority of you suggested that we call it Chandoo.org Podcast. This keeps the name generic, sticks to our brand and sets us apart. So that is what we will call it.

The full name of the show is Chandoo.org Podcast – Become Awesome in Data Analysis, Charting, Dashboards & VBA using Excel

And our first episode will be launched on Thursday, 6th of March.

If you’re building large models, then you may want to use volatile functions – including OFFSET(), INDIRECT(), and TODAY() – with caution, because unless you know what you are doing, they *might* slow Excel down to the point that data entry is sluggish, if not downright tedious.

In fact, you *might* want to consider getting out of the habit of using these functions at all if there are alternatives, and you might want to replace volatile functions in your existing models with non-volatile alternatives…I have reduced recalculation time in large models from minutes to milliseconds by doing just that!

So what the heck does volatile actually mean? And why should you care? Let’s find out, shall we?