All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

Mustache and Excel?!? Sounds as unlikely as 3D pie charts & Peltier. But I have a story to tell. So grab a cup of coffee and follow me.

Today, lets talk about how to construct a dynamic chart that can show us how much progress we have made against a financial goal (in this case, accumulating a big chunk of money). I call this growing mustache chart, inspired from the wonderful Mr. Money Mustache.

Everyone likes to be in control. Even my 2 year old daughter jumps with joy when she lays her hands on TV remote. She pushes the buttons and assumes it is working. It is another story that we rarely watch TV at home.

By adding an element of control, we can make our dashboard reports fun. Interactive elements like form controls, slicers etc. invite users to play with your dashboard, get involved and understand data by asking questions. That is why I recommend making dashboards interactive.

Today lets understand how you can make dashboards interactive.

Welcome to Chandoo.org. Thank you so much for taking time to visit us.

Over the last few weeks, we have quite a few new members to the site. Its good time I said hello and introduced this site to you.

PS: If you have been following chandoo.org for a while, you can still find useful information in this post. So read on.

When I was in Perth, I visited Hui’s house one day. Lovely, Hui’s daughter (who is about 14) asked Hui how he knew me. So Hui told that we both share a passion for Excel and that;s how we got to know each other. Then she asked, What is Excel?

At this point, we both tried to explain what Excel is to her in a few ways with no success. Later Hui came up with a brilliant explanation.

He said, Excel has lots of small calculators all interconnected, so that you can do any sort of calculation.

So here is a challenge for you. How would you explain Excel to a small kid (computer literate, but not yet in college).

We know that using VLOOKUP, we can find a value corresponding to a given item. For example Sales of x. But what if you have multiple sales for each item and you want the last value?

Today lets understand how to find the last date of an activity, given data like above.

Like everything else in Excel, there are multiple ways to finding last date. If cats can use computers, they would hate Excel. You see, Excel is overflowing with unlimited ways to skin a cat.

Have you ever wanted to make your own Custom Chart type ?
MarnieB was asked by her boss to make a Spoke Chart !

This post will explain how you can make a custom Excel Spoke Chart and introduce you to techniques that can be used to make other custom chart types.

A while ago (well more than 3 years ago), I wrote about an array formula based technique to check if a list of values have any duplicates in them.

Today, lets learn a simpler formula to check if a list has duplicate numbers.

Assuming you have some numbers in a range B4:B10 as shown below, we can use MODE + COUNTIF formulas to check if there are any duplicate values in a list.

Ever wondered how much your Excel skills are worth?

Here is 2 step procedure to find out.
1) Complete this survey. Tell me how much you make & what you do.
2) Wait for a week and we will tell you how much Excel professionals are earning all over the world 🙂

PS: You can be anonymous.

So who is up for an Excel challenge?

Shelly, who is an HR Manager sent this distress call last week,

“I have a group of employees- lets say 100 employees. Each employee has a performance rating attached to them. I want to divide the group by 5%, 15%, 65%, 10%, 5% based on their performance rating.”

And that is our challenge today. Read on & help Shelly.

Hello folks,

I have a quick announcement. As you may know, I am doing a set of Excel & Dashboards Masterclasses in Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane. We had a fantastic session in Sydney (with 18 delegates). We are sold out in Melbourne & have 2 spots left in Brisbane. But we kept getting requests for more in Melbourne. So we have added an additional session in Melbourne. This is right after Queen’s birthday – on 12th & 13th of June. Please use below links to enroll for the masterclass if you are interested.

• Melbourne Masterclass – 12 & 13 June
• Brisbane Masterclass – 31May & 1 June

Reviews from our Sydney masterclass delegates
We asked the delegates of our Sydney masterclass to tell us how they liked it. Here is a short video with their reviews (4 min):

Suresh sent an email with interesting problem.

There is one data entry sheet where all the data needs will be entered, however once done we want the data to be stored separately in multiple sheets designated by the Employee code.

In this article we will learn how to use VBA to help in resolving the problem Suresh was facing at work.

Hello folks,

My flight to Sydney has been lengthy but fun. I have reached here on Sunday morning (8AM) and spent most of the day with Danielle’s family. (Danielle is the founder of Plum Solutions. She is the one who invited me to Australia and planned this whole experience for me).
On Monday (30th April), I went exploring the city on foot. I had coffee in the beautiful Queen Victoria Building, attended 1PM church service at the magnificent St. Mary’s cathedral, walked thru Hyde park, went to Sydney central station, took at sneak peek at the new Apple store in down town, got back to my hotel, walked to Opera house to meet up with our readers.

Reader meetup at Sydney
We had 6 people turn up for the meetup. It was fun talking about Excel & our journey with these wonderful folks. Here is a pic (you can see the harbor bridge in background & 8 awesome Excel users in foreground, Click on it to enlarge).

Ever wondered how we can use Excel to send emails thru Outlook? In this article we well learn how to use VBA and Microsoft Outlook to send emails with your reports as attachment.

Scenario: We have an excel based reporting template. We want to update this template using VBA code to create a static version and email it to a list of people. We will define the recipient list in a separate sheet.

Read on…

Welcome back. In third installment of our Customer Service Dashboard series, we will learn how to construct the charts in our dashboard. We will understand the sparklines, traffic lights & dynamic chart setup. To help you learn better, I have recorded a short video too. Go ahead and enjoy.

This week many Excel bloggers are celebrating VLOOKUP week. So I wanted to chip in and give you a comprehensive guide to VLOOKUP & Other lookup formulas. Read on …,

What is VLOOKUP Formula & how to use it?

I often tell my excel school students that learning VLOOKUP formulas will change your basic approach towards data. You will suddenly feel that you have discovered a superman cape in your attic. It is that awesome.