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Last week, we talked about how to copy and paste visible cells alone (ie exclude any filtered rows or hidden columns etc.) In the comments section many of you suggested two more ways to deal with this annoying problem. Let’s take a look them.

Here is something annoying with Excel.

Open any Excel file with few columns of data. Hide some of those columns (select the columns and press CTRL+0). Now, copy a few rows of data. Paste it else where. Excel will paste the values in hidden columns too. We thought Excel would omit the values in hidden columns.

What the filter Excel?!? I thought we were friends, but you annoy me with some of these quirks.

Game for some charting awesomeness?

Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.

Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?

How about the one above?

Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.

Yesterday we saw a beautiful example of panel charts with R. Today let me show you how to create the same (or even better) with Power BI & R. What you need: Power BI Desktop and R Raw data set – rem-data.csv Creating Panel Charts in Power BI with R Load CSV data in to […]

Recently, I had to make a bunch of panel charts. After wrangling with Excel (and a tiny bit of VBA) to create them, I wondered if we are suffering needlessly by being too loyal to Excel. I switched to R and could create these panel charts in almost no time (well, first I had to learn how to pivot the data using dplyr). Today, let me share the experience.

Ever had a workbook with multiple protected worksheets? May be you are enterprise architect at Death Star or chief strategist at Mordor and got all the plans in a tidy little but protected workbook. Of course, you hate having to unprotect many of the worksheets every time you have a new evil plan for world domination. Don’t you worry, you can use this handy little trick to unproect en masse.

• Just open the workbook
• Go to File > Info
• Right on the top, you can see all protected worksheets and a link to unprotect them.
• Click to unprotect the ones you want to.
• Done.

Let’s say you got some text values and want to extract the amounts from them. Something like above.

How to go about it?

We could use a variety of techniques to extract the values.

• Formulas – not easy given the unstructured nature of data. But almost possible. See this for an example.
• VBA – possible, read this forum discussion few ways to do it.
• Power Query – at first glance it might seem tricky, but PQ makes this all too easy. Read on.

Over on Twitter, I came across this beautiful chart, aptly titled – Joyplot. It is the kind of chart that makes you all curious and awed. So I did what any Excel nerd would do. Recreated it in Excel of course. This post takes you thru the process.

Take a look at final outcome above. Read on to learn more.

The other day, I was building a spreadsheet to calculate FTE (full time equivalent) for staff based on hours worked on various days in a fortnight. While building the spreadsheet, I came across an interesting problem. Rounding Time to nearest minute.  We can’t use ROUND() or MROUND() to round time as these formulas aren’t designed to work with time values. Although time values are technically decimal, rounding time to nearest minute (or quarter hour etc.) can be tricky when usual round formulas. Let me share a few formulas to round time to nearest point.

Let’s say you have a time value (either user input or calculated) in cell A1.

Use below formulas to round time in A1.

When faced with tough problems I react in one of three ways

1. Come up with ingenious solutions
2. See if a simpler cheat solution is possible
3. Sit back and ignore

For most problems, I choose 3rd reaction. Occasionally, I rely on 2nd option and very rarely the first one.

When faced with a tricky time sheet summary problem (as outlined above), after initial lethargy I wanted to solve it.

Jo, my lovely wife quit her job as my partner in crime at Chandoo.org recently and took up a lucrative position at NZ govt. agency. The other day I asked her “how was your day?” when she got home. She smiled and said, “I learned my first Excel shortcut!”.
Guess what it is?

F4.

That is right. The mighty F4 key. You can use it to repeat any action.

Jo was using it to insert rows in her workbook. After inserting first row (using CTRL+ of course), she would press F4 to add more rows as needed.

Here is a simple but vital charting rule.

Start your bar (or column) charts from zero.

To illustrate why you should do this, let me share a personal example.

Over the weekend, the Jon Peltier visited Wellington. He is staying with Jeff (who occasionally guest blogs on Chandoo.org). On Sunday, we all decided to hike up a small mountain near my house for a leisurely family picnic.

While on the top of the mountain, Jo (my wife) took a few pics of us three Excel geeks.  As we were standing on a sloping mountain face this is how the pictures look.

Looking at the picture on left, you would confidently say that I am way shorter than other two. But picture on right tells a different story.

Recently I was creating a pivot report with multiple items in row labels area. I had to show sub-totals, but only for one of the fields. Something like above.

How to show selective sub-totals in Pivot Tables

Imagine you are head of human resources at Casual Contracting Co. Every month you hire a lot of temporary staff who spend 1-4 months with CCC before leaving. Sometimes you hire the same people again. Of late, you have noticed a strange process gap. You are paying same person two (or more) salaries.

This is because you are hiring a person for new temp role even before their current one ended. See above picture.

So how to avoid making such hiring boo-boos.

Simple, using Excel of course.

Excel Tables have been around for a decade now (they are introduced in Excel 2007), and yet, very few people use them. They are versatile, easy and elegant. At Chandoo.org, we celebrate Tables all the time. If you have never used them, start with below tuts.

• Introduction to Excel tables
• How to use structured referencing
• Tables and Relationships in Excel
• Using lookups and other formulas with Excel tables
• Simple way to get absolute references in Tables
• Customizing table styles for awesome usability

While tables are super helpful, they do come with some limitations. Today let’s examine one such unique problem and learn about an elegant solution.