All articles in 'Learn Excel' Category

My polar clock using donut charts in excel started a conversation and readers have been awesome enough to download the excel and create their own clocks to show time. Even though the idea of this blog is share the little that I know with you, it is amazing how much I have learned from you […]

The other day my wife told me that we dream about a total of 6 years in our life, an average of 2 hours for everyday you sleep. [Source: wikipedia on dreams]. That is almost as much time as you would work in 30 years (30*50*40/24/365, assuming you work 40 hours a week for 50 […]

Smashing Magazine is one of daily hangouts for new design ideas, inspiration and ogle fun. When they featured Pixel Breaker’s Polar clock last Friday on Top 10 creative ways to display time, I knew this could be an interesting visualization to do in excel. So I have created a donut chart in excel that can […]

If your reports include hourly distribution of data like, Customer footfalls in your store Page views of your site Customer service calls to your toll free numbers here is an interesting charting idea to show the data around the clock (literally) Update: Visualization pros Jon Peltier and Jorge Camoes took a critical look at this, […]

If you ever had to simulate random outcomes in excel sheet, you might have already heard of about the spreadsheet function rand(), this little function generates a random fraction between 0 and 1 whenever you use it. So I usually write =round(rand()*12,0)int(rand()*12)+1 if I need a random number between 0 to 12. Of course, if […]

Excel formulas can always be very handy, especially when you are stuck with data and need to get something done fast. But how well do you know the spreadsheet formulas? Discover these 15 extremely powerful excel formulas and save a ton of time next time you open that spreadsheet. 1. Change the case of cell […]

My Olympic medals by country year visualization in excel is received well by readers. I got few interesting emails on it. Robert from Germany shares an interesting approach at doing this, by doing a heat map of the medal counts on an outline world map. This is very impressive and involves flood filling countries with […]

I use google suggest to get new post ideas, I start out by typing “what is”, “who is”, “how to”, “when is”, “where is”, “excel” and see all the suggestions Google comes up with. If I see something interesting I would mark the search topic and use it for posting here. And for the last […]

Next time you want to make a chart to tell how your sales (defects, customer calls, page views, number of clicks, walk-ins etc.) are doing over a period of time, consider showing them in a min-max chart. For eg. a min-max sales chart for the last 12 months tells average, minimum and maximum sales per […]

Dashboards are daily staple for some of us who need to report status to our bosses, present them in weekly meetings or generally CC half the world with what is up on our end. There are several ways in which you can spice up the dashboard, one of the simple things to do is, to […]

When I saw the Olympic medals won by each country by year infographic on nytimes my jaw almost dropped, go ahead see it and come back, I am sure you will love it too. It is one of the coolest visualizations I have seen in the recent past and I see infographics all the time, […]

Passion, excitement, inspiration or love – whatever you choose to call it, is the key reason we do remarkable things. Take a minute break here, think about the most significant moments in your life. What is common in all of those moments? I am sure your answer will be Passion or excitement, love, inspiration. I […]

Blog reader Richard asks through email: I’m a non-programing user of Excel. I import stock prices, using what is called ( I believe) a dde link, into my spreadsheets,from a trading program. I would like to add a feature to my spreadsheets that, like conditional formatting, alerts me to a price change in a cell, […]

Who said Excel takes lot of time / steps do something? Here is a list of 15 incredibly fun things you can do to your spreadsheets and each takes no more than 5 seconds to do. Happy Friday 🙂 1. Change the shape / color of cell comments Just select the cell comment, go to […]

RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs. If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like: Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites […]