Extracting Unique, Duplicate and Missing Items using Formulas [spreadcheats]

Often I wish Microsoft had spent the effort and time on a data genie (and a set of powerful formulas) that can automate common data cleanup tasks like extracting duplicates, makings lists unique, find missing items, remove spaces etc. Alas, instead they have provided features like clippy which are intrusive to say the least. So […]

Adding Box Plots to Show Data Distribution in Dashboards [Part 6 of 6]

This is a Guest Post by Robert on Visualization Techniques for Excel KPI Dashboards. This 6 Part Tutorial on Management Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs in the […]

Making Pie-charts look Sexy – The CNN’s tax burden analysis chart

There is always a debate about how good or evil pie charts are. While visualization purists believe pie charts should be avoided at all costs, newbies find creating and using pies very easy and often over do it. I have blogged few techniques involving pie chart visualizations like in-cell pie charts, speedometer charts, donut clocks […]

Sorting Text in Excel using Formulas

Sorting text is such a day to day activity that it always surprises me why Excel hasn’t provided a simple spreadsheet formula for doing it. Of course you can use the sorting menu command (menu > data > sort) but this requires manual steps (or VBA). Most of the times we get raw textual data […]

KPI Dashboards – Compare 2 Decision Parameters [Part 5 of 6]

This is a Guest Post by Robert on Visualization Techniques for KPI Dashboards using Excel. This 6 Part Tutorial on Management Dashboards Teaches YOU: Creating a Scrollable List View in Dashboard Add Ability to Sort on Any KPI to the Dashboard Highlight KPIs Based on Percentile Add Microcharts to KPI Dashboards Compare 2 KPIs in […]

Handling spelling mistakes while searching your data using excel

Spelling mistakes are a thing of day to day carporate life. Most of the data in spreadsheets is entered by people and hence prone to having spelling mistakes or alternate spellings. For eg. a person named John could have been spelled as Jon. And when John calls you back to confirm his reservation and you […]

Sorting a list of items in random order in excel – using formulas

In shuffling a list of items in excel I have described the technique of using random numbers generated by RAND() to sort a list of items. The technique had one disadvantage though, every time you need to reshuffle the list you have to press F9 to recalculate the rand() and then go to menu > […]