Excel Links – Back to India Edition

As some of you know almost 10 days back I left Denmark and came back to India. I had to come back because of visa and personal issues. For the next 6 months PHDs will be based out of India and working from home. While this gives me a lot more time, I will be playing a lot with Nishanth and Nakshatra and spending time with Jo. I am hoping to write regularly and work on few interesting ideas (may be a new blog too) in this time. Let us see how the summer of 2010 works out.

In this week’s excel links,

Importing Text to Excel – All you need to know

When we work with external data, often the data is in a text file. Excel has a useful feature called “Text to Columns” that can help us take any text file and put the content in spreadsheet in a way we want. Jan Karel Pieterse, Microsoft Excel MVP rounds up the Import Text features in Excel in a very useful and informative article. Read it to learn various tricks and hidden features of text to columns utility.

Data Pig’s New Book on Excel and Access – First Chapter Free

Mike Alexander of Data Pig has a new book called The Excel Analyst’s Guide to Access. You can pre-order the book today. Mike has posted the complete first chapter online on his blog for all of us to read and gain some cool access wisdom. Go!

How to use custom lists to change the sort order

Some of you may know that when you write “Jan”, “Feb” in 2 cells and fill down, the rest of the cells automatically get “Mar”,”Apr”…,”Dec”. This is because they are defined as lists in Excel. We can add more lists to excel to help us in auto-fills. For eg. you can add the list of products (or projects or employees) to excel as a custom list. Once the values are in custom list, we can use the list order to sort our tables in custom order too. Debra shares a little tip on how to do this. Read more about this on Contextures website.

Why stacked bar charts are not such a good idea

Tony from Support Analytics dissects a stacked column chart and tells us why stacking may not be a very good idea. He proposes using a line chart or panel chart instead. Read the commentary so that you can avoid such mistakes in future.

Transferring data within VBA Macros

Doug from Newton Excel Bach has an informative article on how to use variables in VBA. If you write / work with macros I recommend reading this post to understand some of the key ideas on variable scope.

Do you want to share an excel tip or idea?

Pls. send me an email or post a comment and I will be glad to share interesting ideas and articles with our readers here.

Hello Awesome...

My name is Chandoo. Thanks for dropping by. My mission is to make you awesome in Excel & your work. I live in Wellington, New Zealand. When I am not F9ing my formulas, I cycle, cook or play lego with my kids. Know more about me.

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