All articles in 'ideas' Category

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 […]

I came across this brilliant ad from Citibank advertising their metro card for Delhi metro, see it yourself. I have taken Delhi metro first time during my summer internship in 2005. The system was excellent even at that time. I felt proud riding a world class air conditioned carriage from my hotel to the heart […]

A significant amount of my job work involves drinking copious amount of coffee while looking out the window. Ok, I am kidding 🙂 I wish my job involved all that, but I still drink a cup of coffee every workday (Weekends are obviously reserved for good old Filter Kaapi). Unfortunately I am forced to buy […]

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 […]

Gone are the days when software jobs are called ‘coder’ or ‘programmer’, as sophistication increased companies started calling the same coder as ‘software engineer’ or ‘programmer analyst’, then there were ‘sr. evangelists’, ‘associates’ and ‘server gurus’, but in the new era where demand is outstripping supply, naming a job creatively is as important as the […]

Yesterday while on treadmill I got this idea (btw, what is your favorite spot for generating new ideas?) – a calorie card its like a gas card, A membership card for gyms / health clubs. The key difference is that, instead of using the card whenever you spend money, you use calorie card whenever you […]

Look at the above Vodafone ad, the latest one where a cute little girl is constantly getting help from a cute little pug in various situations while a beautiful jingle is played in the background. The ad ends saying that “Vodafone is all too happy to help you” when you need them. Even though I […]

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 […]

Last night while looking for chocolate chip ice-cream, I couldn’t help but notice this perfect example of a “brand blinding the eyes of the manager so much that she neglects customers”. Take a look at the graters ice cream cups. Can you identify vanilla from chocolate chip from strawberry when all cups look like this. […]

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 […]

Dear Google: I must appreciate your efforts to make my online life as simple as scratching my forehead. You have so many services that whenever I visit a website that offers something spectacular I secretly wonder whether you are behind it. But, recently you started putting a nice menu on the top of your sites […]

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) […]

Most of the time doing a print advertisement is much more difficult than doing a normal video ad, the creativity is limited to a rectangle on the paper and no matter how much effort is spent on the ad, your audience may not even look at it for more than a split second. Only very […]