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Excel Howtos

Highlight due dates in Excel – Show items due, overdue and completed in different colors

Congratulations to you if your job does not involve dead lines. For the rest of us, deadlines are the sole motivation for working (barring free internet & the coffee machine in 2nd floor, of course). So today, lets talk about a very familiar problem.

How to highlight due dates in Excel?

The item can be an invoice, a to do activity, a project or anything. So how would you do it using Excel?

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May 18, 2020

Power Query

Multiple Find Replace with Power Query List.Accumulate()

Imagine you have a paragraph of text and you want to replace all occurrences of {four, normal, mysterious, nonsense} with {six, casual, confounding, handbags}. How would you do that?

You could use SUBSTITUTE() formula, but you need to nest four of them (as we need to replace four values with another four). But what if you have larger set of find / replacements?

Worry not, you can use Power Query to transform original text to new one by replacing all matching values.

In this page, learn how to do that with the excellent List.Accumulate() Power Query function.

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May 14, 2020

Area chart with positive negative colors

Charts and Graphs

How to show positive / negative colors in area charts? [Quick tip]

Ever wanted to make an area chart with up down colors, something like this? Then this tip is for you.

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May 12, 2020

Charts and Graphs

6 Best charts to show % progress against goal

Back when I was working as a project lead, everyday my project manager would ask me the same question.

“Chandoo, whats the progress?”

He was so punctual about it, even on days when our coffee machine wasn’t working.

As you can see, tracking progress is an obsession we all have. At this very moment, if you pay close attention, you can hear mouse clicks of thousands of analysts and managers all over the world making project progress charts.

So today, lets talk about best charts to show % progress against a goal.

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May 8, 2020

Charts and Graphs

Easy Website Metrics Dashboard with Excel

Do you run an e-commerce website? You are going to love this simple, clear and easy website metrics dashboard. You can track 15 metrics (KPIs) and visualize their performance. The best part, it takes no more than 15 minutes to setup and use. Here is a preview of the dashboard.

Click to download the template.

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April 28, 2020

Charts and Graphs

What are Excel Sparklines & How to use them? 5 Secret Tips

Of all the charting features in Excel, Sparklines are my absolute favorite. These bite-sized graphs can fit in a cell and show powerful insights. Edward Tufte coined the term sparkline and defined it as,

intense, simple, word-sized graphics

Sparklines (often called as micro-charts) add rich visualization capability to tabular data without taking too much space. This page provides a complete tutorial on Excel sparklines.

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April 23, 2020

Charts and Graphs

Add slope line to XY charts

Slope line is very useful for spotting which values have changed from two sets. You can add a slope line to XY chart (scatter plot) using simple techniques. In this post, learn how to add them.

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April 21, 2020

Learn Excel

Excel Dynamic Array Functions – What are they, how to use them, Examples and FAQs

Excel Dynamic Array Functions are a true game changer. These newly introduced DA functions can filter, sort, remove duplicates and do much more. The output of these functions can go to a range of cells. Hence the name – dynamic array functions.

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April 11, 2020