All articles in 'hacks' Category

Let us learn a simple charting hack to create a thermo-meter chart in excel. This type of charts can be effective in communicating one data point, they can make excellent presentation slide or dashboard widget. What more, they are as simple to do as adding whipped cream to your latte. So lets begin: 1. First […]

While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything. First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, […]

Imagine you have long list of data and you need to quickly identify which of the items are unique. You can use Advanced Filters to do this. Just select the list of items you want to filter, go to menu > Data > Filter > Advanced filter. You will see a dialog box like this: […]

Reader Nikhil Shah asks in an email: Dear Chandoo, I have some Error In Excel sheet. Problem :- I have a locker number 01234 567890, in Excel it will be displayed as 01234 567890 with the space. However if it was entered as 01234567890, Excel will display it as 1234567890, without the leading zero. If […]

While trying to understand how the Mozilla firefox search plug-ins work [ more ] I got curious and wrote a search plug-in that will take you to the first Google search result directly instead of displaying the results pages, ie mimicking the “I am feeling lucky” searches. Feel free to download and install it. 1. […]

Often we work with large data sheets and it becomes tedious if you want to compare data / formulas etc. You can try split (menu > window > split or alt+w+s) to break the sheet in to two. But there is another cool thing you can do, open a new window for the spreadsheet. Just […]

Excel concatenate() is seriously crippled, it can add 2 or more strings together, as long as they are supplied as separate parameters. This means, when you have a range of cells with text which you want to add up to create a large text, you need to write an ugly looking biggish concatenate() or use […]

One of the most frequent tasks for any manager is “planning”, be it putting together a hiring schedule or designing a jumbo jet, it all starts with a simple project plan and gantt chart is simple and intuitive representation of the same. But how to make a gantt chart in excel without writing too many […]

Ever since writing the create in-cell pie charts in excel, I have been itching to find a simple enough method to do incell bar graphs. An in-cell bar would probably be more useful and cuter than an in-cell pie as it can instantly provide trending details. What more, these would probably look gorgeous when printed […]

Here is a ridiculously easy trick to do nice incell pie charts in excel, what more, they will make you look like a charting wizard. Download free pie chart font from here (direct download link). The font has 21 pie chart codes starting with empty circle (character ‘a’) and ending with full circle (character ‘u’) […]

After seeing DI’s Open Your Favorite Websites Directly from Windows Vista Start post, I thought why not use Windows XP Run dialog box as a search box. So here is a simple trick that can enable you to open your favorite sites directly from XP’s run dialog box. Using this trick you can type “g […]

I was toying with the idea of creating a tag cloud in excel – as a form of new visualization, this could be useful when you have medium amounts of data (eg: 50-300 rows) and you want to emphasize on what is important and what is not. I would imagine using a tag-cloud, When you […]

Here is a ridiculously simple workaround for those of you trying to generate an organization chart in excel: Use google org. chart widget instead 🙂 [If you are reading this in a feedreader this post may not display properly, visit the post page instead.] Open a new google docs spreadsheet (or work on the example […]

Here is a simple to trick to beat the 56 color limitation in excel when you are designing a chart: use picture files (jpg, gif, png etc.) to fill the chart area. You will no longer have to worry about limiting your project report / website / annual report etc. colors to the 56 that […]

Do you know that you can use excel find – replace dialog to change cell formats? Often we prepare a report or project plan and our boss or someone else in the team feels that all the red color cells need to change to blue or something similar, worry not, you can use find-replace (ctrl+h) […]