Excel Links of the Week – Minor Changes to PHD edition

We had a long weekend in India due to Republic Day on 26th January and that means, I have enough time to fiddle with some of the things on the blog design / code front. There are few minor changes in the blog sidebar layout and RSS Feeds.

» The sidebar on the home page features some of the most frequently searched excel and charting topics like top 5 formulas, howtos, charting tutorials. To checkout the featured topics, visit the homepage.
» We now have a page dedicated to people who want to advertise on PHD. Write to me if you want to advertise your products / company on this site.
» The RSS feed address is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/PointyHairedDilbert not http://feeds.feedburner.com/PointyHairedDilbert. Don’t worry about the change as Google will take care of redirecting your feeds, but just in case.
» If you are one of the 500 e-mail subscribers of PHD, going forward you will receive e-mails from excelandcharting @ gmail.com and not chandoo.d @ gmail.com. Please redefine any rules you might have defined in outlook / mail software to handle the new mail id.

Ok, enough self-promotion, let us take a look at this week’s excel links and articles from around web.

Understand Stock Charts in Excel

In this excellent tutorial, Jon explains stock charts in excel and how you can use them. Read it if you have never used a stock chart or don’t know what they are.

Choose the Right Chart Using this Flow Chart

This flow chart is very useful for deciding on the right type of chart for your data and visualization needs. Also checkout Juice Analytics’ Chart Chooser

Quickly Create Named Ranges using F4 Key

Debra suggests using F4 key to creating named ranges in a snap. Very useful.

Print Multiple Areas from Several Sheets by Creating a Consolidation Sheet

Often you have a large workbook with several sheets and you want to print one consolidated worksheet with all the relevant areas from other sheets. You can create a consolidated sheet and use paste special to paste links to source ranges.

Get a List of Filenames in a Directory to Excel using Browser

You might need this trick if you use excel to manage lists of files (I do this all the time, when I am uploading a bunch of images to my site and need to create IMG tags)