All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

One of the most useful features of Excel is formula help box. You know the little yellow box that appears as soon as you start typing a formula in a cell. I use this all the time to understand what the syntax of a particular function is, what parameters to pass etc.

Although I love it, sometimes it does get in the way when writing formulas. Because the help box sits on top of my data, often I find it hard to know which cell to link to.

Solution?!?

Simple. Use your mouse to move away the help box wherever you want.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. -Groucho Marx

We don’t have a dog (yet), but we have a lot of books. Anytime I am in a bookshop, I feel like a mosquito in fat-camp. So you can imagine me smacking my lips when I saw your suggestions for favorite Excel books recently. There were more than 50 different books recommended by our readers. Of course I cannot buy all the 50 in one go. That would make Jo (my wife) angry. So I bought one that most of you recommended.

Ctrl + Shift + Enter by Mike Girvin

It is a book about array formulas, advanced formulas and data analysis techniques. I am eagerly waiting for the delivery to devour it. Once I am done with it, I will post a review here.

What about you? What Excel book are you reading now? Please share in comments.

Hi folks,

I am super-excited to tell you that Chandoo.org Podcast will be launching on 6th of March (Thursday). First episode is already recorded and I am getting ready for the big launch.

Name of the podcast

Last week I asked you what should we call our podcast. And I got more than 250 suggestions (150+ thru comments another 100 thru email). While the suggestions ranged from funny (chanpoo, addict.xls) to word plays (Excelent cast, Lord of the cells, Speaking Cells) to outright brilliant (XL.AM remember AM radio?). Some of the suggestions were crazy too: Word on the sheet, YouChandooIt, Didasko.xlsx – greek word “to impart knowledge”.

Thanks everyone for the ideas and suggestions.

A majority of you suggested that we call it Chandoo.org Podcast. This keeps the name generic, sticks to our brand and sets us apart. So that is what we will call it.

The full name of the show is Chandoo.org Podcast – Become Awesome in Data Analysis, Charting, Dashboards & VBA using Excel

And our first episode will be launched on Thursday, 6th of March.

If you’re building large models, then you may want to use volatile functions – including OFFSET(), INDIRECT(), and TODAY() – with caution, because unless you know what you are doing, they *might* slow Excel down to the point that data entry is sluggish, if not downright tedious.

In fact, you *might* want to consider getting out of the habit of using these functions at all if there are alternatives, and you might want to replace volatile functions in your existing models with non-volatile alternatives…I have reduced recalculation time in large models from minutes to milliseconds by doing just that!

So what the heck does volatile actually mean? And why should you care? Let’s find out, shall we?

Recently I posted about how you could construct dynamic (cascading) dropdowns that could easily handle multiple levels, like this: …and we saw that users could subsequently change upstream dropdowns in a way that would make downstream choices invalid, like this: In my previous post I used some VBA to clear out any ‘downstream’ choices if […]

Friends and supporters of Chandoo.org,

I am very happy to tell you about another great way to learn Excel & stay awesome

Chandoo.org podcast

That is right. As part our mission to make you awesome in Excel, this year I will be adding a podcast.

Gantt charts are a very popular way to visually depict project plans. Today, let us learn how to use Excel to make quick & easy Project Plan Gantt Chart.

This is what we will be creating.

Today lets talk about Excel books. The question is simple.

What is your favorite Excel book? Please share your answers using comments.

My favorite books are..,

Well here’s something I never knew until today…I was watching one of Mike ExcelIsFun Girvin’s great YouTube videos from his great Slaying Excel Dragons series – the one on Excel 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts – when he showed how to do the equivalent of a mouse right click using a key on the keyboard that I’d […]

Howdy folks. Jeff here. I recently gave a presentation on Excel efficiency to a bunch of analysts, in which – among other things – I’d pointed out that if you ever find yourself having to switch calculation to Manual, there’s probably something wrong with your spreadsheet. Here’s the slide:   This prompted one of the […]

Bar & Column charts are very useful for comparison. Here is a little trick that can enhance them even more.

Lets say you are looking at sales of various products in a column chart. And you want to know how sales of a given product compare with a lower bound (last year sales) and an upper bound (competition benchmark). By adding these boundary markers, your chart instantly becomes even more meaningful.

Lets learn how to create a column chart with lower & upper bounds in this tutorial.

Sometime during the 2nd half of 2013, I finished 10 years of Excel usage. In the last 10 years, I completed my studies, got my first job, married, had kids, visited 15 different countries, quit my job to start a business, bought first car, first house, made dozens of new friends, read 100s of books, wrote a book and learned 1000s of new things. And all along, Excel stayed a true companion. Right from MBA entrance exam preparation in 2003 to making my summer internship project reports in 2005 to planning my wedding expenses in 2007 to getting a promotion in 2009 to planning my kids feeding schedule in 2010 to running a successful business in 2014, Excel helped me in every step.

So today, I want to tell you the top 10 things I learned using Excel in last decade. Grab a hot cup of coffee, buckle your belts and get ready for time travel.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2014 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.

This year has been busiest year since inception of Chandoo.org. Wow, that is 10 years in a row of breaking previous records.

We had 101 posts, 7,400+ comments this year. Since our forum went thru a migration, I could not gather exact stats for forum. We have trained more than 2,500 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & Power Pivot classes.

More than 7.5 million people visited our site in last 1 year (up 14%) and consumed a whopping 20 million pages (up 16%). Each of these visitors spent an average of 2 minutes 21 seconds on our site becoming awesome in Excel. There are 1.8 million people who spent at least 15 minutes on our site.

We have added more than 25,000 members to our newsletter / RSS reader community, crossing 80,000 mark. It is a busy year.

Read on to find the best of Chandoo.org in 2013.

Yesterday was Halloween. To our readers who are not familiar with it, ‘Halloween is a colorful festival with lots of costumes, scary stories, theme parties and trick-or-treating, celebrated on 31st October, every year.” I have never celebrated Halloween as it is an unknown tradition in India where I live. But that is no excuse. Especially when the celebration calls for colorful clothes, scary themed houses and shrieking kids.

Of course, we are not going to have a traditional Halloween. Because,

• At our house, we use pumpkins to make sambar, not lights
• The only ones with costumes in our house are my kids.
• If I send my kids for trick or treat, they will get neither.

So that brings us to the only part of Halloween that I can celebrate. Telling scary stories.

So lets talk about the stuff that scares us. But bear in mind that I am not interested in that time when you & your cousin went camping and stumbled in to an abandoned log cabin to discover the …Save it for real Halloween.

We want to talk stuff that scares you in Excel of course.