It has been a while since we had an Excel Links feature. So here we go again. But before jumping in to all the Excel goodness, let me share a few tidbits about our Bangkok adventure.
As you may know, we (Jo, kids & I) have temporarily moved to Bangkok for a few months. If all goes well, we plan to live here until 1st week of March before returning to India.
So far, we are really loving this place. We rented an apartment on the busy Sukhumvit road (near PhromPhong BTS) for 2 months. The apartment is on 20th floor and we have amazing views of various sky-scrappers, sky train and awesome sky. In fact the kids like the view so much that, we spend half-an-hour every night just watching the trains from our bedroom window, before they sleep.
Since this is not a pure vacation, I spend a few hours everyday replying to emails & comments, preparing content for this blog, helping students on Excel School & VBA Classes and other work stuff. But rest of my day is free and we are enjoying it by eating strange food, taking kids to beautiful parks (we went to the calm & vast chatuchak park area last weekend), taking leisurely strolls. I have also started playing squash & swimming.
Some pics (click to enlarge)
One side effect of all this is, I am not able to spend as much time replying to your emails. So if you have sent us something and not heard back, please drop a reminder and I will get back to you at earliest. And oh yeah, I love you for doing that 🙂
Back to Excel links…,
This week, I have a few interesting Excel articles & tips to help you. Click on these and enjoy.
How to set meaningful axis scales in Excel charts
Jon Peltier dissects a poorly constructed chart and along way shows us how to set up proper axis scale etc. so the chart communicates concisely. While on Jon’s site, also check out how to get answers for your excel questions for some good ideas. He missed out our forum, but good list nevertheless.
15 Spreadsheet formatting tips
Ever wondered how to make a usable, good looking Excel workbook? If so, check this out for some really handy tips & excellent ideas.
More on Excel formatting here: How to make better excel sheets, Formatting tips
FREE Webinar on Spreadsheet Risk Management
Myles, who writes the spreadsheet risk management articles on chandoo.org shared this link with me. If you are responsible for a lot of workbooks, this free webinar might give you some ideas on how to reduce the risk.
Generating Invoice Numbers in Excel
Learn how to use VBA to generate invoice numbers in Excel, automatically.
Excel Drop Down list from a different workbook
Debra shows us how to use lists in other workbooks as source for drop-downs in Excel.
That is all for now.
We have some exciting new tips & Excel awesomeness waiting to happen this week. Stay tuned!
Until then, as they say in Thailand, Kob Khun Krup (meaning thank you).
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good