Author Archive

Here is a trap that is easy to fall in to. Confusing correlation as causation. As analysts, it is our job to see the data as it is rather than imply causation that doesn’t exist.

Let’s sample a chart, recently featured in Economist’s graphic detail under the title Measuring well-being.

Let’s say you have a date in A1 and want to find out future date after 2 years, 4 months and 9 days.

Here are a few formulas you can try.

1. =A1 + DATE(2,4,9)
2. =EDATE(A1, 2*12+4) + 9
3. =A1 + 2*365 + 4*30 + 9

Surprisingly, each formula gives a different result! So which one should you use?

Let’s kick start our Awesome August 2016 with a simple but very useful set of shortcuts. 5 shortcuts, one for each weekday.

1. Monday ALT + M N: Open name manager. Very handy, if you have quite a few range names and want to edit / manage them. Remember, this is a sequence shortcut, that means, you press ALT M, let go of both keys and then press N.
2. Tuesday CTRL + T: Create a new table from data in current region. For more on tables, check out our Introduction to Excel Tables page.
3. Wednesday CTRL + W: Close the current workbook, while keeping Excel open.
4. Thursday ALT + T O: Opens Excel options. Very easy to remember too.
5. Friday CTRL F: Fridays can be hard to concentrate. Use CTRL+F to find what you want in the current workbook. Use CTRL+H if you wish to do a find replace.

One of the coolest features of Excel 2016 is forecasting. Today, let’s understand how it works with a sample data set.

Watch below video to understand forecasting in Excel 2016.

This is third episode of our Monthly Master Class.

In this one, you will learn how to get maps in to your Excel workbooks. Understand 5 key techniques for making maps based visualizations in Excel – from regular charts to cell grids to VBA to Power Maps, everything is covered in this intense Master Class.

Here is an interesting problem to start your day.

Let’s say you work as DNA sequencing engineer at The Enterprise. And you just unlocked the sequence that is responsible for all male problems. The early onset of baldness. The sequence code is AAAA. And you want to find out how many times this sequence is found in a sample of DNA strings, in the range B6:B19. Essentially you want the above.

So how do you write the formula?

Here is a quick & awesome way to make your dashboards sexy. Add an on / off switch to your conditional formats.

Take a look at above demo to understand what I mean.

Time for a quick personal update. We (Jo, kids & I) are moving to New Zealand on July 15th. We are going to Wellington and will be living there for next 2 years. New Zealand…Really? Why? How? To understand that, we need to go back in time, to EDATE(TODAY(), -75). In April 2010, I moved back to […]

Our newest contest is inspired from a question asked by Kaushik, one of our forum members, interesting problem.

Need to quickly visualize 3 variables ( Company, years, Financials) in a single […] chart.

Create a chart to understand multiple variable data and you could win $100 Amazon gift card. Do send your charts before 4th of July to qualify for the prizes.

My twins (Nishanth & Nakshtra) are now almost 7. They are super keen to learn how computers work. So the other day, I showed them Code.org where there are several coding exercises disguised as games. They loved those games … err coding exercises. So that got me thinking… why not make a game in Excel that teaches kids simple programming concepts.

So I built a Snowman & Hot Chocolate Maze game. In this post, let’s understand how to build such a game using Excel VBA.

Okay, this is an extension of the Neither “A” Nor “B” sum problem we discussed few days back.

Imagine you have a table named mydata with a few columns and a stop list named stop.list as shown above.

How would you calculate,

• Sum of Hours for all activities excluding those in stop list?
• Sum of all Regular hours for activities not in stop list?

So go ahead and post your answers in the comments.

We know how to use SUMIFS function to answer questions like, “What is the sum of values for ‘A’?”  But how would you answer questions like,

• What is the sum of values that are neither “A” nor “B”?

We can still use SUMIFS, but it will get awfully long. So let’s turn our attention to other functions in Excel.

Last night I got an email from Joshua, one of our readers with the subject – Hard Excel problem. Hard?!?, at this stage of summer, the hard problems seem to be (in no particular order),

1. Lack of good quality mangoes to eat
2. Intense heat and humidity
3. Lack of good quality mangoes to eat

Yes, I like mangoes.

Any how, back to Joshua’s email, So I got curios and read it. He is facing a curious problem.

Ever wanted to show your workbook to someone and felt that you had less screen real estate? This tip will help you get more out of your workbook.

So how to get 50% more space for your workbooks?

Simple, just follow these steps.

A few days back, WSJ ran a visualization titled “What’s your pay gap?” It depicts median pay gap between female & male workers in 422 different professions in USA. The chart uses fish eye effect to highlight the selected profession. See below demo to understand the effect.