All articles in 'hacks' Category

The other day I had to make an excel sheet for tracking all errors across one of the applications we are doing for our customer. The format was something like this, We wanted to use a consistent message id format [4 digits: 0001, 0002, … , 1000 etc.]. Now I do not want to type […]

Yesterday we were calculating our Washington trip expenses and it occurred to me that if there is an excel template where I could enter the trip expenses and who paid what to find out how much we need to pay up / collect, it would be great. I looked around for few seconds, couldn’t find […]

After moving the blog from the blogger to wordpress, my first challenge was to organize the posts for better discovery and search. I have done that by automatically generating tags and tagging posts using a bit of analysis and a bit of insanity. The next challenge was to redirect the traffic from the old blogger […]

As you all may know I have recently moved my blog from blogger to wordpress. Since I have started blogging way back in 2004 most of my posts were untagged. I have used blogger labels ever since they were introduced, still almost 400 of my posts were untagged. I had two options, Manually edit posts […]

4 days of Christmas break without a thing to do. The first thing that came to my mind is to revamp my blog. I have been thinking of upgrading the blog (yes, thats right, upgrading) to wordpress from blogger for a while now. Since my blog is hosted on another site through ftp, there is […]

Yesterday while going through my feeds, I have landed on this post about the demographics and use-figures of various social networking (2.0) tools, et al (by businessweek) on think:lab blog. When I looked at the BusinessWeek’s graphical representation of demographics and usage figures of social networks, the first thought that came to me is, “well, […]

or Excel Charting Hacks # 2Roughly 35-40% of my working time in office is spent with powerpoint. As one of my mentors said, powerpoint gives neither the power nor the point. Apart from writing truck loads of bullet points and using auto shapes, I also work alot with numbers and charts. Obviously I resort to […]

Refer to other sheets in conditional formating. You can only refer to the sheet where conditional formating is being applied. Refer to closed workbooks using indirect() function. It will return #Ref error when you refer to other workbooks in indirect function. By the way if you want to refer to some other workbook in your […]

The other day I had to make some graphs about revenues and profits of a set of companies. While doing it I wanted to use bar chart with bars of profit and revenue overlapping. But when I mentioned the revenue as 3000 and profit as 1500, the graph would show up something like this. As […]