All articles in 'technology' Category

I was doing some weird analysis on corporate mission statements and I had to count the number of words in each cell. That is when I realized there is no formula to calculate the number of words in a cell, I was too lazy to write an UDF for that, so I figured out a […]

Often you may want to fill a column only with weekday dates instead of all dates. Here is a simple trick you can use instead of writing nifty if formulas or manually entering the weekday dates. When you auto fill dates by dragging mouse (or using menu > edit > fill > series > selecting […]

I haven’t noticed this before, but google maps provides 3d building outlines. I think this is pretty cool. You can see them in action here. Earlier on google : Google Park bench in Russia

Let us learn a simple charting hack to create a thermo-meter chart in excel. This type of charts can be effective in communicating one data point, they can make excellent presentation slide or dashboard widget. What more, they are as simple to do as adding whipped cream to your latte. So lets begin: 1. First […]

While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything. First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, […]

Imagine you have long list of data and you need to quickly identify which of the items are unique. You can use Advanced Filters to do this. Just select the list of items you want to filter, go to menu > Data > Filter > Advanced filter. You will see a dialog box like this: […]

Reader Nikhil Shah asks in an email: Dear Chandoo, I have some Error In Excel sheet. Problem :- I have a locker number 01234 567890, in Excel it will be displayed as 01234 567890 with the space. However if it was entered as 01234567890, Excel will display it as 1234567890, without the leading zero. If […]

This is awesome, the new incredible hulk campaign on IMDB is nicely done, I have taken a few screen shots of it to post here, just in case they removed it (but go see it on IMDB to understand what I mean) This shows how to create incredible advertisements by integrating flash (rich media) with […]

Now that iPhone is going to have GPS built in, here is an application idea any of you iPhone app developers out there. The idea is simple, whenever the phone-holder is driving, this app would automatically answer calls with a pre-recorded message (that can go like, “Hi.., I am driving right now, please leave a […]

This is cool, apparently Google resorted to this to beat the leading Russian search provider Yandex. I am not sure whether this would be effective though. Its like forcing people to break a habit. This, probably is the most challenging task for marketers all over the world. When customers are used to Yandex or Naver […]

While trying to understand how the Mozilla firefox search plug-ins work [ more ] I got curious and wrote a search plug-in that will take you to the first Google search result directly instead of displaying the results pages, ie mimicking the “I am feeling lucky” searches. Feel free to download and install it. 1. […]

Often we work with large data sheets and it becomes tedious if you want to compare data / formulas etc. You can try split (menu > window > split or alt+w+s) to break the sheet in to two. But there is another cool thing you can do, open a new window for the spreadsheet. Just […]

Excel concatenate() is seriously crippled, it can add 2 or more strings together, as long as they are supplied as separate parameters. This means, when you have a range of cells with text which you want to add up to create a large text, you need to write an ugly looking biggish concatenate() or use […]

One of the most frequent tasks for any manager is “planning”, be it putting together a hiring schedule or designing a jumbo jet, it all starts with a simple project plan and gantt chart is simple and intuitive representation of the same. But how to make a gantt chart in excel without writing too many […]

Ever since writing the create in-cell pie charts in excel, I have been itching to find a simple enough method to do incell bar graphs. An in-cell bar would probably be more useful and cuter than an in-cell pie as it can instantly provide trending details. What more, these would probably look gorgeous when printed […]