Excel Links – Bacon bits are good edition

Ok, here is a brand new excel blog in the town, from Mike Alexandar, a Microsoft Excel MVP. The blog is called bacon bits. Wonder what bacon has got to do with spreadsheets, well, you will do well to know that his company is called datapig technologies. Mike has written some really cool excel books like Excel 2007 Dashboards & Reports For Dummies, Excel 2007 VBA Programmer’s Reference and Microsoft Excel and Access Integration. The blog looks promising with very cool excel and vba tricks. Add it to your reader or daily stop list and I am sure you will agree with me.

Let us talk about the excel links I have come across recently.

Using XY Charts to draw state maps

Dick Kusleika provides a neat technique for creating US State Maps using XY Charts. Using XY Charts for maps is somewhat cumbersome. I have stopped trying that route after crashing excel fewtimes. Instead, I use Tushar’s method of shapes to construct maps. You can learn more about that here

Generating TinyURLs using Excel

Jimmy provides a simple VBA macro that can generate tinyurls from any given URL. This can be handy if you are planning use run a twitter campaign from excel sheet.

The sad state of Infographics

This is a classic Stephen Few article where he disapproves 2 inforgraphic visualizations and highlights all the mistakes in them. He asks “Is this the best infographics has to offer?” I echo with his opinions. That is one reason why I have stopped posting the cool infographics of the week series.

Help Jorge finish his data visualization e-book

If you have sometime, head over to Jorge’s Junk Charts blog and help him write his e-book on 101 Data Visualization Questions You Were Afraid to Ask. You can win a free copy if your question is selected.

How to design a filter for your dashboards / reports

Juice analytics highlights five features of effective filters. This is a very good lesson if you design dashboards and complex TPS reports where filtering is necessary. I thin the aspects of Selections and Impact are very relevant when designing spreadsheet based filters.

Do you want to share a useful excel or charting related link?

Send me an e-mail or drop a comment. I like to learn and share new stuff about excel, spreadsheets and charting. More so, I like to read emails from *you*. So go ahead…