Author Archive

Ever wanted to make a random sentence or text? You can use Excel formulas to make totally random sentences. This is a great way to generate test data or dummy data-sets.

Happy New Year to all our readers. Let’s kick start 2020 with an awesome calendar, daily planner and monthly calendar template. Please visit the post page to download the 2020 Calendar Excel Template.

Hello readers,

On behalf of my family, our staff, volunteers & well-wishers, Let me wish you a very happy Christmas & prosperous new year 2020. Here is a small holiday card from Chandoo.org HQ. This year, we have a new addition to our family – Excel, bichon-poodle puppy has been with us for a little over one month and already became a big part of our lives.

Hello readers, I have an exciting announcement for you.

I will be presenting at two events at London in April 2020. Please consider this my personal invitation and join me for Excel + Power BI fun.

Filtering a list is a powerful & easy way to analyze data. But filtering requires a lot of clicks & typing. Wouldn’t it be cool if Excel can filter as you type, something like above.

Let’s figure out how to do this using some really simple VBA code.

Power BI is a data analytics & visualization software. It is one of the most popular and powerful way to work with complex business data. In this page, you will find a comprehensive guide to start your Power BI journey.

It’s Halloween time. As adults, we can’t go trick or treating. We can of course dress up in costumes and entertain others. But what about the poor spreadsheets. Don’t they deserve some of this fun too?

Hell yeah! So I made a spider web generator in Excel. Just use it to make a spooky cob web pattern and add it to your report / dashboard / time sheet or whatever else. Surprise your colleagues.

Do you want to simulate multiple cash-flow scenarios and calculate the rate of return? Then this article is for you. In this page, learn how to,

• Introduction to IRR & XIRR functions
• Calculate rate of return from a set of cash-flows with XIRR
• Simulating purchase or terminal value changes with data tables
• Apply conditional formatting to visualize the outputs
• Common issues and challenges faced when using XIRR

It’s tornado season. Don’t freak out, I am talking about Excel tornado charts. Use them to visualize age and gender-wise KPIs. Here is a quick demo of interactive tornado chart made in Excel. Watch it and read on to learn how to make your own tornado in a spreadsheet.

Validating your data as you type can prevent any surprises when you are doing analysis / follow-up on the data. Thankfully, excel has the right tools to do it. Excel drop down list can assist you in picking up a value from a valid list to enter in a cell. Here is a short how-to […]

I have been playing Zelda: Breath of the wild a lot these days and I LOVE the game. Considered one of the BEST video games all time, BOTW is beautifully designed and offers a lot of entertainment. Don’t freak out yet, Chandoo.org hasn’t suddenly branched into a video gaming blog. Instead, I am here to talk about Stamina Wheel Chart.

Learn how to calculate weighted averages in excel using formulas. In this article we will learn what a weighted average is and how to Excel’s SUMPRODUCT formula to calculate weighted average / weighted mean.

What is weighted average?

Wikipedia defines weighted average as, “The weighted mean is similar to an arithmetic mean …, where instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others.”

Calculating weighted averages in excel is not straight forward as there is no built-in formula. But we can use SUMPRODUCT formula to easily calculate them. Read on to find out how.

As part of our Excel Interview Questions series, today let’s look at another interesting challenge. How can you analyze more than 1 million rows data in Excel?

You may know that Excel has a physical limit of 1 million rows (well, its 1,048,576 rows). But that doesn’t mean you can’t analyze more than a million rows in Excel.

The trick is to use Data Model.

This is CRAZY!!!. I stumbled on a weird use for FILTERXML() while reading a forum post earlier today. So I couldn’t wait to test it. I am happy to share the results.

Say you have some text (sentence / phrase / keyword etc.) in a cell and you want to extract the nth word. Unfortunately Excel doesn’t have SPLIT() formula. So we end up writing obscenely long array formulas or use gazillion helper columns.

Here is the super sneaky trick. Use FILTERXML() instead.

We can select a few cells in Excel and quickly see their count, sum etc. in the status bar. Ever wanted to customize the status bar to show something else, say difference? You can use VBA add-ins with application level events to achieve this. In this VBA Example, we will look at how to set up a class module, application event in our personal macro add-in to customize status bar.