All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

On Wednesday (15th July), I ran my first ever webinar, on a topic called, “How to be a BETTER Analyst?” (here is the replay link, in case you missed it).  It was a huge success. More than 1,100 people attend the live webinar and hundreds more watched the replay. As part of the webinar, we had interactive Q&A. Viewers posted their questions and I replied to as many of them as I can.

After the webinar, I wanted to make sure I covered all the questions. So I downloaded the chat history. There were more than 700 messages in it. And I am not in the mood to read line by line to find-out the questions. A good portion of chat messages were not questions but stuff like ‘hello everyone, I am from Idaho’, ‘Wow, Chandoo has beard!”, “Enjoying a beer in Belgium while watching webinar” etc. So I wanted a quick way to flag the messages as question or not.

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 25 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

It is almost weekend. I am sure most of you have plans (if you are USA, wish you happy 4th of July). As for me, I am going on a 80KM (50 mile) bicycle trip to a nearby lake to watch birds on Saturday morning. On Sunday, we (kids & I) are planning to make a scrapbook from our Australian experiences.

So let me keep this nice & simple.

What is the coolest thing you made with Excel?

Go ahead and share your answers in the comments area.

Here is a situation all too familiar.

You are looking at a spreadsheet full of data. You need to analyze and tell a story about it. You have little time. You don’t know where to start.

Today let me share 15 quick, simple & very powerful ways to analyze business data. Ready? Let’s get started.

Slicers are one of my favorite feature in Excel. And here is a quick demo to show why they are my favorite.

Slicers – what are they?

Slicers are visual filters. Using a slicer, you can filter your data (or pivot table, pivot chart) by clicking on the type of data you want.

For example, let’s say you are looking at sales by customer profession in a pivot report. And you want to see how the sales are for a particular region. There are 2 options for you do drill down to an individual region level.

1. Add region as report filter and filter for the region you want.
2. Add a slicer on region and click on the region you want.

With a report filter (or any other filter), you will have to click several times to pick one store. With slicers, it is a matter of simple click.

Read more to learn all about slicers

Here is a fun way to use Paste Special to quickly multiply everything in a range with 1.1 (why 1.1? Well, imagine you have a report with everything in US $s and your boss wants to see the numbers in Australian $s…)

Since your report has different formulas for each cell, you can’t multiply first cell with a rate variable and drag it down. You have to manually edit each formula and add *rate at the end of it.

Oh wait…, you can use Paste Special.

We all know pivot table functionality is a powerful & useful feature. But it comes with some quirks. For example, we cant insert a blank row or column inside pivot tables.

So today let me share a few ideas on how you can insert a blank column.

But first let’s try inserting a column

Imagine you are looking at a pivot table like above.

And you want to insert a column or row. Go ahead and try it.

In about 3 days, I am leaving to USA for participating in PASS Business Analytics conference – 2015. It is an annual event for people in analytics profession. This is the first time I am attending & speaking at the event. I am so excited for many reasons.

• I will be meeting many Excel bloggers, authors & internet friends for the first time
• I will be meeting many of you (readers, listeners, followers & customers of Chandoo.org) too
• I will be speaking at an awesome conference
• I will be visiting San Francisco for the first time in life
• I will be meeting a few college friends too

All this excitement means, I have too much going on. But that shouldn’t leave you out . So here are a few awesome Excel links for you. Check out and learn.

A lot of analysts swear strong allegiance to keyboard shortcuts. But when it comes to formatting a spreadsheet, these shortcuts go for a toss as formatting is a mouse-heavy activity.

But we can use a few simple & effective shortcuts to zip through various day to day formatting tasks. Let me share my favorite formatting shortcuts.

Yay, bring out the birthday hats, candles, cake & confetti. Chandoo.org podcast is 1 year old.

In this one year, we had 31 sessions, 4 guest appearances, 390,000 downloads & lots of 5 star reviews. Thank you so much for making it a grand success so far.

To celebrate the occasion, I want to reward 3 lucky listeners of our podcast.

How to participate in this contest?

1. Simple. Figure out what your favorite Excel tip is.
2. Open your smart phone’s voice recorder app
   1. on iPhone use the Voice Memos app
   2. on Andriod use sVoice or voice recorder widgets
   3. If you cant find these apps, just Google record audio <your phone name>
3. Record the tip (less than 3 mins duration)
4. Please say your name at the end of recording.
5. Send the audio file by email to hello@chandoo.org
6. Do so before end of day 16 March 2015 (Monday)

Once I collect all the tips, I will feature some of them in next episode of Chandoo.org podcast.

Just a quick announcement.

As you may know, I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics conference in Santa Clara this April (between 20th & 22nd). As a run up to the event, the good folks at PASS are conducting free webinars on various topics of Excel.

Here are 2 topics on which I am doing webinars. You can watch them and pick up some really cool Excel skills. Just click on below links to enjoy them.

1. 5 Dashboard mistakes to avoid (watch it any time)
2. Excel charting – productivity tips (live on February 3rd)

That is all for now. See you in the webinar.

If you are an Excel enthusiast, here is a feast for you.

Just a small glitch, it is a not feast you enjoy with mouth, it is a feast you consume with eyes, ears & mind.

It gives me immense pleasure to invite you to this feast.

A little late to the party, but nevertheless right on track.

As Chandoo.org starts another year of making you awesome, I want to take a few minutes of your time to understand how I can help you better this year?

Please answer this 1 question survey for me.
If you do not see the form below, please click here

This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar. 

Why do so many of us use Excel? Let’s trace it back to the ’80s when Microsoft hit gold by being the first out of the blocks with the widely available operating system that was somewhat dummy proof.

Suddenly everyone could aspire to launch ‘Nukes’ like a fresh faced Matthew Broderick in the film ‘War Games’. 

By the early 90’s Windows had become even more established relative to other Operating Systems, so much so that PC manufacturers were developing components around Windows’ capabilities and suddenly PCs were Windows machines. As big business began accepting the significance of computing, Microsoft started winning huge licensing contracts with all the major corporations in all sectors, but the Finance sector in particular, where Excel would be king, was having an exponential boom at this time. For big organisations, once you spent a fortune buying licences for the Operating System it only made sense to purchase the seamlessly integrated and carefully developed/tested apps to run on them; enter Excel, Word, PowerPoint and eventually Outlook. Fast forward to 2015 and we are firmly in the age of second generation corporate professionals who have developed much of their productivity skill sets around those particular Windows tools. While all the excellent tools have their place, Excel stands out and here are 8 reasons why you need to up your Excel game more than ever this year.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2015 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calender has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.