What a Monday it is. Most of the us woke up to find that whatever we have been accumulating for the last few years in investment gains has been wiped out (BSE Sensex at 2 year low, Dow slips below 10000). Not a very pleasant way to start the week, but then may be this is the time to start that website you were talking about, that teaching gig you were hoping to do, that restaurant you were planning to start.
Back to spreadsheets.
Should you use petal charts at all? In petal charts – an alternative to radar charts, I have proposed a radar chart hack that can used replace radar charts. I know that it is not a very good alternative to radar charts, but I went ahead and proposed it. I got very good feedback from readers that petals are as worse as radars and I couldn’t agree with you more. Now, Jon Peltier has a follow up article on this topic where he dissects the petal charts and suggests what could be a better option for you. Also check out : Information Ocean post on reorderable tables – Bertin vs. Spiders to know some more charting alternatives to radars.
Clustered Stacked Column Charts with Vertical Separators Despite looking like a bunch of charting jargon, the hack proposed at Peltier’s site is a very clever way to get clustered stacked effect in charts, can be very useful if you ever need to cluster your stacked columns to convey messages.
Insert or Delete with Auto-Fill, This is a simple yet very useful tip. Debra at contextures blog says,
I often have to insert a few cells in a list, so I select a range of cells, then choose Insert > Cells, click Shift cells down, then click OK. That method works very nicely, but it’s four clicks. I don’t have time for four clicks!
Recently I learned that I can press the Shift key and drag the AutoFill handle to insert cells. You can drag up, down, left or right, to insert cells in any direction. It’s much quicker than all those clicks!
Very useful.
A Sudoku Solver using Excel , In this 2 part tutorial (first part here) Charlie Ellis, a program manager at Excel team in MS shows us how to build a basic sudoku solver using excel’s iterative calculation techniques. A fun way to learn how the calculations work in excel.
9 Steps to Powerpoint Magic, ok, this is not about Excel, but as useful to us as learning to work with spreadsheets. The advice comes from none other than Seth Godin himself. Make sure you read this before you are going to make the next presentation.
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