Format faster with paste special & double click [video]
Making your workbooks, charts, dashboards & presentations beautiful is a time consuming process. It is a mix of art & craft. Naturally, we spend hours polishing that important slideshow or visualization. But do you know about simple features in Excel that can save you a lot of time and help you create gorgeous output?
VLOOKUP the last value
VLOOKUP is one of the most useful Excel functions. So much so that I even wrote a book about it. But it has one serious limitation.
It looks up the first occurrence and returns corresponding data.
What if you want to find the last value?
Say, for example, you are looking at a task assignment list and want to know what is the last task assigned to employee Emp13?
We want to extract the task “Make amazing workbook”. Of course our good old VLOOKUP stops once it finds Emp13 and returns the answer as “Create intuitive workbook”.
Calculate sum of top 10 values [formulas + homework]
Analyzing top n (or bottom m) items is an important part of any data analysis exercise. In this article, we are going to learn Excel formulas to help you with that.
Let’s say you are the lead analyst at a large retail chain in Ohio, USA. You are looking at the latest sales data for all the 300 stores. You want to calculate the total sales of top 10 stores. Read on to learn the techniques.
How to highlight overdue items [video]
We, adults can’t escape three things:
- Deadlines
- Demanding bosses (replace with customers or nagging spouses or naughty kids)
- Taxes
While I can’t help you with demanding bosses or taxes, when it comes to deadlines, I have the right tool for you.
A tracker that highlights all overdue items so that you know where to focus your attention.
Let’s learn how to use awesome powers of Excel to find-out which items are due. You can apply these concepts to nail down over due invoices, pending project tasks or scheduling workforce.
Announcing Awesome August
Hi folks,
I am excited to announce Awesome August. It is a month-long effort to make you awesome in various aspects of Excel.
Awesome August… What is it?
For each and every day of August 2015, I am going to publish a new piece of content – an Excel tip, a formula technique, a charting solution or a productivity booster. 31 days – 31 pieces of awesome content.
Sounds Yummy? Participate in Awesome August:
There are 4 ways to participate in Awesome August
- Sign-up to Chandoo.org newsletter. Get weekly emails with links to all the Awesome August content.
- Comment & Win: Comment on any of the Awesome August posts. 31 random commenters will each get $31 Amazon gift-card.
- Follow Awesome August in social media – on twitter, facebook, youtube and iTunes
- Ask your friends & colleagues to participate. Send them to Chandoo.org/AwesomeAugust
How to find out if a text contains question? [Excel formulas]
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.
Are you an analyst? Use these 25 shortcuts & tricks to boost your productivity
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.