Excel Links of the Week – What the heck happened to photographic fridays edition

Remember the photographic fridays? Some of you must be thinking whatever happened those posts? Well, my intention for writing those posts has been to get your feedback so that few of us can become better photographers. But flickr does a hell of better job for this than my little blog can. So I have decided to stop posting pics here and instead get the feedback through flickr. If you have enjoyed the photos, remember, you can always subscribe to my flickr feed or visit the photostream page.

On to this week’s excel links:

40 tools & resources to visualize data

FlowingData shares with us a list of tools and resources so that we can play with our data. My favorites? Obviously excel, but often I use some programming language (other than VBA) to pre-process data. What are your favorite tools for data visualization?

Old Style Menus in Excel 2007

One of the common complaints about excel 2007 is the way it has changed UI and how it is difficult to locate some of the common stuff in the new ribbon structure. Andrew helps us with some VBA to bring back the older menus to Excel 2007. Check it out yourself and see if you can use them. For me, I am still in the comforts of 2003.

Refreshing Multiple Pivot Tables with One Click

Often when you have multiple pivot tables or web query lookups it is painful to refresh each table to get the correct data. Debra from Contextures Blog shows how you can use “Refresh all” to update multiple pivot tables. Very simple yet productive trick.

Making vlookups go fuzzy

VLOOKUP() is one of the most useful formulas in excel. But what good it is when your data is not that clean? Well, you can still use vlookup (or hlookup, match etc.) to perform searches on your data. For eg. do you know that you can add asterisks before and after the lookup value so that you can search the occurrence. vlookup(“*google*”, list_of_companies, price, false) would match google, google inc., the google (and return the first match of course). JP at Code for Excel and Outlook shares with us how he has used this technique to create worksheet matching to return row number.

Real time fuel price monitoring tool in Excel

Excel web queries is one of my favorite tools. It is an easy to use and yet powerful feature to access tabular data stored anywhere on the web. MyXcelcius blog shows a technique to create excel fuel price monitoring tool using web queries and simple dashboard techniques.

Have a super duper week ahead everyone.