How to create cascading drop downs in Excel – video
Cascading drop downs enhance usability of your dashboards & interactive workbooks. A cascading drop-down is a 2 or more level selection mechanism. When you have 100s of selection choices, instead of creating one massive drop down or combo-box, you can set up multiple levels of drop downs, so that users can narrow down their selection. For example, users can select Country, State and then City using cascading drop downs.
There are many ways to setup cascading drop downs. You can use formulas coupled with either data validation or form controls. You can also use Slicers. In this video we will review these techniques.
Dynamic Print Areas
Yesterday, you learned about Print Areas – a time & paper saving feature of Excel. While print areas are great, you can only set up one print area per sheet. What if you want to print either report or data based on user selection?
In such cases, you can set up dynamic print areas.
That is right. See above demo to understand how it looks. Read on to learn how to set up dynamic print areas.
Save time & paper with print areas in Excel
Here is a very simple but effective tip: use print areas. Oh.. but what is a print area? Imagine looking at a report or dashboard worksheet. Now, that sheet also has few calculations, some extra stuff to the right of the report. When you print, you don’t need those extra elements. Just the report will do. This […]
Reconcile debits & credits using Solver [Advanced Excel]
Here is a tricky problem often faced by accountants and finance professionals: Let’s say you have 5 customers. Each of them need to pay you some money. Instead of paying the total amount in one go, they paid you in 30 small transactions. The total amount of these transactions matches how much they need to pay you. But you don’t know which customer paid which amounts. How would you reconcile the books?
If you match the transactions manually, it can take an eternity – after all there are more than 931 zillion combinations (5^30).
This is where solver can be handy. Solver can find optimal solution for problems like this before you finish your first cup of coffee.
Use mail merge to create custom letters, invoices, labels and more
The idea of mail merge is simple & powerful. Imagine you handle recruitment at a large company. You just hired 300 analysts for the big data division. The next job – generate employment offer letters for each of them. Of course, you don’t want to type these letters one at a time. You have the details of all the 300 offers (name, email, address, offer code, role, benefit package details and date of joining etc.) in a spreadsheet. You also have a template of the offer letter.
Enter mail merge. This powerful feature of MS Word combines (Excel) data with Word document contents to generate all the 300 letters in just few minutes.
In-cell 5 star chart – tutorial & template
Whenever we talk about product ratings & customer satisfaction, 5 star ratings come to our mind. Today, let’s learn how to create a simple & elegant 5 star in-cell chart in Excel. Something like above.
Read on to learn how to create the above chart.
Work with charts faster using selection pane & select object tools [quick video tip]
Working with multiple charts (or drawing shapes / images) can be a very slow process. But here is a secret to boost your productivity.
Use selection pane & select object tools
Selection Pane & Select Objects?
If you have never heard of these, don’t worry. These are 2 very powerful features hidden in Excel. Once you know how to unlock them, you will never look back.
How to use selection pane & select object tools to work with charts faster – Video
In this video, understand how to use these powerful features to work with charts faster.