Last Saturday our internet connection at home went off. I called the road runner folks hoping to getting it back up, but no luck. We were told to wait till Monday evening before the service personnel could restore the connectivity. Thankfully, we didnt feel all that bored and could spend lot of time talking to each other, playing cards, watching some old dvds, taking lengthy walks inside our apartment community and cooking great food.
What would you do on an internet free weekend?
Here is a list of very good excel articles I found during last week:
Rob found that you can actually create shapes using UDFs (user defined functions). So he used that to create a neat function for drawing incell spark lines. Very useful and simple. [Daily Dose of Excel]
Buy Office 2007 – Ultimate version dirt cheap!!!
If you have .edu email id then Microsoft Ultimate Steal deal is the way for buying MS Office 2007. You can save 91% off the usual price of Office 2007 Ultimate. [via Digital Inspiration]
How to Install add-in : Microsoft Excel 2007
My friend Jon provides a step by step guide to installing add-ins to MS Excel 2007, very useful if you are constantly downloading UDFs / Macros from web and experimenting with them
How much money do you need in your retirement?
Another variation of retirement calculator. Whatever may the version you use, the message is simple: Start saving.
8 Slide making tips you can learn from IKEA
This is not exactly an excel tip, but useful to everyone who makes their living by telling stories, selling ideas.
Like this edition of Excel links? Also see:
8 Responses to “Excel links of the week – weekend without wire [Aug 26]”
Hi Chandoo,
thanks for your entertaining blog.
I worked a bit on the code posted at "Daily Dose of Excel" and created a whole set of UDFs for sparklines... follow the link.
http://sparklines-excel.blogspot.com/
PS : there is more to come...soon
Regards
This is totally off topic, but seeing as this has become my goto site for excel information I thought I'd throw it up here and see what the response is.
(This is in excel 2003) So I've gone through the process of adding the alphabet as a custom list for autofill. Which is silly but fine, it's done. But now I find that there is another issue, lets say I want a list of project codes, if the list client=letter, client=number then it's fine, autofill starts with A-1 and goes to A-2, etc. But if it's the other way, i.e. 1-A, then autofill gives me nothing, just a column of 1-A's. Now I know the easiest answer is just write things with the number at the end, unfortunately that trivial decision is above my pay-grade.
As I said I'm less looking for magical answers as wondering outloud. Feel free to ignore me....
@Fabrice
I have been using your sparkline-udfs for quite a while now (since I found them on http://sourceforge.net/ 2 or 3 months ago) and I have to say that – in my humble opinion – your implementation of sparklines (and sparkbars and spark bullet graphs and scale lines and pareto charts) with Microsoft Excel is by far
- the most comprehensive,
- the most stable,
- the most easy-to-use and
- the best documented one that I have found on the internet.
I already used your sparkcharts in a couple of my models and the charts are so awesome that I recommend them to everybody. And I mean everybody. Fabrice’s workbook is so self-explanatory that even users without any knowledge of vba can use them with ease.
Fabrice, thank you very much for sharing the sparklines with us and please keep up your brilliant work! I am looking forward to the next version.
@ Robert
Waoo !! What can I say but a big ... THANKS !
Your comment alone is worth the effort ...
Regards from Paris
F
Yet another:
@Fabrice:
No need to say thank you. It is us who have to say thank you.
@All readers of Pointy Haired Dilbert:
Just to make clear: my previous comment has nothing to do with the famous French-German-friendship. And it was not an advertisement in disguise or viral marketing. Oh, by the way, did I mention that Fabrice offers this incredible piece of work for free? Amazing, but indeed he does!
Downloadable from different websites (http://excelidees.blogspot.com/ or http://sourceforge.net/projects/sparklinesforxl/), no vba password protection and even documented with examples in the workbook. No need for an add-in, no need for special fonts.
Yes indeed, it is for free. Go and download Fabrice’s workbook and let your workbooks make a huge leap forward.
Create Microsoft Excel models with visualizations in Edward Tufte’s style (http://www.edwardtufte.com) within a couple of minutes.
Doesn’t that sound interesting?
Best regards from Munich
R.
@Fabrice: Thanks for sharing this with our readers. I am going to feature it in a post sometime this week. Hope many more people will find this useful.
@Eric: thanks for thinking out loud, unfortunately I havent come across a simple way to force excel to reconsider its autofill. May be there is some VBA code that can change the way auto fill works. But that would be too painful for day to day use. Here is a simple suggestion, I know you may have already hit upon it, but let me put it, "why dont you create a custom list with all possible proj#-client combinations and add this to your autofill custom lists? I am sure the list is not that big and it is a one time process?
Hi Chandoo, Robert and all
Just to let you know I posted a new version of Spraklines for Excel on sourceforge.net.
Ciao !
@Fabrice
Thanks for the information about the release of sparklines 2.3.0!
What can I say? Optimized pareto sparkcharts, new variance sparkcharts, even waterfall sparkcharts are in now. Awesome! Your new version exceeded my expectations far and away.
I think you can’t even imagine how much value your sparkcharts add to my work. My excel models are not that bad themselves, but adding your sparkcharts to my dashboards means conjuring the stars upon the eyes of my clients and lets the lights in conference room flicker! Your sparkcharts are simply the icing on my cake.
Merci mille fois!!