All articles in 'hacks' Category

Firefox 3 has a ton of extremely useful productivity features and as I keep using it, I discover more and more of them. Here is one I found extremely useful and simple: When you have lots of tabs open, in order to switch between the tabs, place mouse pointer on any of the tab titles […]

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 […]

Do you know that you can mute conversations in gmail if you are do not want to see that lengthy thread on single subjected that people wont give up. Just select the mail / conversation you want to mute Click on “More actions” and select “mute” Enjoy the bliss If you want search for muted […]

Often my work involves processing web page data in excel sheets. This includes extracting the hyperlinks from cell contents. There is no formula for extracting hyperlinks though, you can right click on cell and choose “edit hyperlink” to see which address the cell is linking to. But that is a tedious process especially if you […]

change-sort-orientation-excel-columns You can sort data across columns instead of rows by changing sort options. If you ever had to sort across columns now you know a simple way to do this 🙂 Follow these steps for changing sort orientation: Select the table you want to sort (just the data, not the headers as when you […]

Bullet graphs provide an effective way to dashboard target vs. actual performance data, the bread and butter of corporate analytics. Howmuchever effective they are, the sad truth is there is no one easy way to do them in excel. I have prepared a short tutorial that can make you a dashboard ninja without writing extensive […]

In response to Making Incell charts better article, reader Tony mailed me an excel sheet in which he has modified the charts to display colors and negative values. This is pretty cool. Take a look at the chart below: The trick lies in displaying the charts in 2 rows, one for positive values and another […]

I can never get tired of in-cell charts, whenever I get sometime, I try to experiment something on them. Here is an idea to design true incell column charts without using any add-ins or installing fonts. These charts can be fun to have on your project report or annual news letter or memos, they take […]

Each of us have our mechanisms to track how we spend money. We use Excel, various online sites and software like Quicken or Microsoft Money to track how we spend our bucks. The bottom line is to track where each penny / paisa / cent is going. So, how great would be it be, if […]

How geeky are you? Show off your geekness to others with this kickass room decor ideas, Just click the images to follow up. live geek, love geek 😀 1. Lets start with the door. You can experiment with the door locks to create your own puzzle: 2. Now that you are in how geeky would […]

Jon @ Peltiertech has taken a critical look at the partition charts suggested yesterday. You can read his review of the partition charts here. One of the commenters on his site said, Jon, the partition chart is not that bad. It just needs to be defragmented… 🙂 So I de-fragmented my partition chart, this time […]

Next time you had to create a pie chart, consider building a partition chart as these charts can reveal trend information along with how much each pie is contributing. What more? They are as easy to create as eating a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream 🙂 I made a sample partition chart based on […]

I was doing some weird analysis on corporate mission statements and I had to count the number of words in each cell. That is when I realized there is no formula to calculate the number of words in a cell, I was too lazy to write an UDF for that, so I figured out a […]

Often you may want to fill a column only with weekday dates instead of all dates. Here is a simple trick you can use instead of writing nifty if formulas or manually entering the weekday dates. When you auto fill dates by dragging mouse (or using menu > edit > fill > series > selecting […]