Today I am celebrating my 27th birthday. “not much left before thirty”, my wife playfully reminds me. “We still have 3 more years to go”, I said, thinking about all those things to do before I turn thirty list. All in all the year has been fantastic. We have moved to US for work reasons, I learned how to drive a car (on the roads that is), Got a mac, DSLR and iPOD nano, Started a small but fruitful business in India, Visited to New York and Niagara waterfalls, Overcame my fear of roller coasters, Became passionate about photography and excel, Came to know some of the coolest excel gurus in the world and Read all 7 books in the harry potter series. I hope this one turns out even better.
On to this weeks list of excel links.
14 misconceptions about charts and graphs
This excellent article by Jorge nails all the important charting misconceptions down. Make sure you read and understand this list before heading to make your next chart. My favorite is #2: You Should Master the (Technological) Tools of the Trade. While you need to know the technology enough to create good charts, great charts on the other hand come from you & your imagination.
9 steps to better chart formatting
Jon provides us with 9 simple yet very effective steps to create better charts. I have been thinking about writing on this for a while, but thanks to Jon, I don’t have to worry about it now.
When was the last time hidden cells created such issue? A formatting fubar in one of the excel spreadsheets containing contracts that are acquired by Barclays Capital from Lehman Brothers highlights the perils of hidden cells. We all know that you can hide a row / column in excel by right clicking on the row / column header and selecting hide option. Make sure you tell about the hidden cells when you share your work with others.
Handling CSV files when the content has genuine commas
CSV files are a popular way to share tabular data. You can use them in Excel without thinking twice. But what if you need to create CSV for content that has commas already in it? Daily Dose of Excel provides us with some VBA to handle delimiters in CSV files.
Don’t forget about the A in VBA
This article by Stephane Viot, a Program Manager at MS Excel Team, reminds us about the Automation part of VBA. We all try to solve uncommon problems in Excel by using little VBA wizardry. But often we leave the last steps for manual processing. The article addresses one such problem (extracting unique cells from a range) and tells us how we can automate the whole thing.
Earlier Excel Links:
Excel Links – Mt. Rainier Edition
Excel Links [Oct 6]
Excel Links – Complete Archive
Want to share a link? Use the comments form below or mail me at chandoo.d at gmail.com
7 Responses to “Excel Links of the Week – Birthday Edition”
Health and Happiness to you Pointy Haired Dilbert on your birthday, and your good lady.
Many thanks for sharing your knowledge about excel on this blog. You have raised my game - you are a top man! Just stay like you are now.
I am raising a cup of tea to you here in London.
Warm regards
denise
Happy Birthday with many repeats. May you live long and be healthy to keep this blog up and running. I've found much inspiration and interesting discussion here and am a steady reader.
Best wishes from New Zealand with a virtual Pavlova
Teylyn
@Denise and Teylyn, thanks that is so sweet.
Happy Birthday Chandoo!!! U r and inspiration. I love your blog... have a great year ahead!!!
@Sukhbinder.. thank you very much 🙂 I am thankful to all the readers for inspiring me to learn new stuff on daily basis.
"Read all 7 books in the harry potter series"
haha you're up one notch in my books. how did you like them?
@Bazlina.. they are the coolest books I have ever read. Very very imaginative, extremely fun and so well thought out. They beat any type of fiction out in the market.