Author Archive

Hi everyone, I have a quick announcement for you.

Registrations for our VBA class will be closing in a few hours

As you may know, we have re-opened the doors for our VBA Class on September 5th. This program is aimed at beginners & intermediate level users. The aim of our VBA class is to make you awesome in Excel & VBA.

We will be closing registrations for this program in few more hours (exactly at 11:59 PM, Pacific time, on 16th September, 2011)

Click here to join our VBA Class now.

Hello Data Junkies & Chart Lovers, I have a fun announcement for you. If you like to analyze data and present results in charts, then you can win up to $3000 in prizes by participating in Microsoft’s BI DataMashUp Contest. The contest is on from September 8th and runs until 28th. How to Participate in […]

First a Quick Announcement: Our VBA Class enrollments will be closed this Friday (Sep 16). If you want to learn VBA & Excel, please consider joining our course. More than 120 students have already joined us in the second batch and are learning VBA as you read this. Click here to learn more about the VBA Classes and join us.

Moving on…,

As you may know, Chandoo.org offers quite a few Online Excel training programs. Over the last few weeks, many of you have emailed us and asked which training program is best for your situation. This got me thinking. “It should be easy for YOU to know what is best.”

So today morning, I locked my office room and made a beautiful Excel workbook that asks you only 2 questions and tells you which training programs are best for you. Try it here.

Over at PTS Blog, my dear friend & charting guru, Jon Peltier has an interesting post on using dot plots to visualize Murders & Suicides data by US States.

Not that murders & suicides fascinate me, but I wanted to play with this data myself and see how we can visualize it. So I emailed Jon and asked him to share the raw data. Being a lovely chap Jon is, he immediately sent me the data. So here we are, playing with gory data on a Friday.

Suicides & Murders by US States – An Interactive Excel Chart

You can see a demo of the chart I came up with above. Read on to learn how this chart is constructed.

This article is part of our VBA Crash Course. Please read the rest of the articles in this series by clicking below links.

In the part 5 of our VBA Crash Course, let me share you my tips for mastering Excel VBA.

A warning before jumping in to the tips: I am not a VBA expert. I am a learner, just like you. I find VBA quite interesting language to learn and explore. These tips are based on what I have learned writing VBA (and VB code) in the last 12 years.

Dear Friends & Readers of Chandoo.org

I am happy to announce that our Online VBA Training Program is now open for your consideration. Please read this short post to understand the benefits of this program and how you can join. Click here to join our class, if you are ready.

What is this VBA Class?

VBA Class is a structured and comprehensive online training program for learning Microsoft Excel VBA (Macros). It is full of real world examples & useful theory.

The aim of VBA Classes is to make a beginner an expert in VBA.

In part 4 of our VBA Crash Course, we are going to create our very first VBA application using what we learned so far.

We will take the “We Are Nuts” example and create a daily sales tracker application using all the things you have learned so far. You can download the example VBA workbook and play with it to learn better.

In part 3 of our VBA Crash Course, we are going to learn how to speak with various Excel objects like Cells, Ranges etc. and deal with them.

Objects – what are they?

Any thing and everything is an object. Your dog, your bed, your neighbors cat, their car, your bike, your computer, the shiny new Excel workbook you just created, my website, your email account – every thing is an object.

From our “We are nuts” example yesterday, you can already see these objects:

One awesome owner (that is you)
24 store manager objects
24 store objects

In part 2 of our VBA Crash Course, we are going to learn what Variables, Conditions & Loops are and how to use them in Excel VBA.

What are Variables, Conditions & Loops?

If you are new to computer programming, you might think I am speaking legalese. So, to make it easy to understand, lets assume you run a bunch of stores across the town. To make it colorful, lets call your stores “We are nuts” – a dry fruit and nuts store chain. At the end of every day, you call each of the 24 store managers and ask them how much sales they have made in that day.

Now, you are not the kind of boss who micro-manages & nitpicks. So you don’t really note down sale for every store. Instead, as you call the store manager, you just mentally update the total. So first store says “$2,300” your total is 2300. Second manger says “$4,000”, the total now will be 6300. So on.

The value 6300 here is nothing but a variable.

We will use the “We are nuts” example thru out this lesson & towards the end we will build a sales logging application using Excel VBA.

This article is part of our VBA Crash Course. Please read the rest of the articles in this series by clicking below links.

1. What is VBA & Writing your First VBA Macro in Excel
2. Understanding Variables, Conditions & Loops in VBA
3. Using Cells, Ranges & Other Objects in your Macros
4. Putting it all together – Your First VBA Application using Excel
5. My Top 10 Tips for Mastering VBA & Excel Macros

Hello lovelies,

We break the regular awesomeness on Excel & related beauty to bring you an important notice.

You may know that I run an online Excel & Dashboard training program, called as Excel School. We have been running this course since Jan 2009 and trained more than 1,500 students thru this so far. And starting next Monday (29 August), the course prices are going up.

So, if you are waiting to become awesome in Excel, now is your chance.

Click here to learn more about Excel School & Join us.

Any Tom, Dick and Sally can make things complex. It takes guts and clarity to simplify things. That is why I was pleasantly surprised to see this dashboard prepared by Michigan State. You can see it in the detailed article.

Linda, one of My Excel School students shared this dashboard link with me and asked if I can show how to construct something like this. Here is my version of the dashboard.

Read this post to learn how to construct a similar dashboard on your own. Also, you can download the excel workbook and play with it.

Hafiz, One of our avid readers, writes in. My problem is when I convert data from text to column using dash “-“, conversion is easy. but when the gap provided in text is with “alt+enter”, I can’t convert the data.

Well, I tried to use text to columns feature (from Data ribbon) and it would not work.

Although you can use formulas to do the splitting, they might become tedious. So the next logical option is to use macros.

In this article, learn how to use VBA to split text on New Line characters

Who is this course for?

If you use MS Excel to do data analysis, reporting, day to day tracking or project management then this is the right course for you. If you struggle with formulas or not sure which formula to use for any given occasion, then this is the perfect course for you. We will be introducing more than 40 different formulas with 100s of examples in this course. As we will be using realistic data & examples, you can very quickly apply the same to your day to day work and do so much more with ease & confidence.

Click here to learn more & join this course.

It is megaphone time at Chandoo.org. I have a few quick announcements about upcoming training programs & other interesting stuff. Just read on 🙂

1. VBA Classes – 2nd batch details.
2. Good news for our Indian customers
3. New Excel Formula Crash Course – from tomorrow (17 August)
4. Excel School prices going up!
5. Recommended Live Training – Mike’s Power Analyst Bootcamp in US