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Latest Tips & Tutorials

CP031: Invisibility Tricks – How to make things disappear in Excel?

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In the 31st session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s disappear.

What is in this session?

Spreadsheets are complex things. They have outputs, calculation tabs, inputs, VBA code, from controls, charts, pivot tables and occasional picture of hello kitty. But when it comes to making a workbook production ready, you may want to hide away few things so it looks tidy.

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

Quick announcements first anniversary of our podcast etc.
Hiding cells, rows, columns & sheets
Hiding chart data points
On/off effect with form controls, conditional formatting
Making objects, charts, pictures disappear
Disabling grid-lines, formula bar & headings
Hiding things in print

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March 5, 2015

CP030: Detecting fraud in data using Excel – 5 techniques for you

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In the 30th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s learn how to uncover fraud in data.

What is in this session?

In the wake of hedge fund scams, accounting frauds and globalization, We, analysts are constantly second guessing every source of data. So how do you answer a simple question like, “am I being lied to?” while looking at a set of numbers your supplier has sent you.

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

Quick announcements about 50 ways & 200k BRM
Introduction to fraud detection
5 techniques for detecting fraud
- Benford’s law
- Auto correlation
- Discontinuity at zero
- Analysis of distribution
- Learning systems & decision trees
Implementing these techniques in Excel
A word of caution

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February 19, 2015

Who is the most consistent seller? [BYOD]

Who is the most consistent of all?

Imagine you are a category manager at a large e-commerce company. Your site offers various products, but you don’t really make these products. You list products made by other vendors on your site. Every day, these vendors would send you invoices for the amount of product they have sold. Above is a snapshot of such invoices.

Looking at this list, you have a few questions.

Who is the best seller?
Who is the most active seller?
Who is the most consistent seller?
Which seller has fewest invoices?

Let’s go ahead and answer these using Excel. Shall we?

Read This »

February 18, 2015

Revenue vs. Commission growth – Getting the message across [BYOD]

Situation: Our commissions are growing way faster than revenues
Let’s say you are looking revenues & sales commissions of your company for last few years. The data looks like this:

And you want to highlight the fact that commissions are growing faster than revenues.

So you plot YoY growth rates for revenues & commissions.

Problem: The chart of YoY growth rates is not convincing

Take a look at the chart. It doesn’t convey the message that we want. At best it says “revenue growth is less than commission growth”

How to convey the message “Commission growth is a problem for us”?

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February 17, 2015

How to consolidate data that is different shapes [BYOD]

Last week, I asked my email newsletter readers to submit “one data analysis problem you are struggling with”. We called it BYOD – Bring your own data. More than 100 people have emailed various interesting (and often very difficult) problems. This week (between 16th of February to 20th of February), let’s take a look at some of these problems and solve them.

Consolidating data in different shapes

We can use either VBA or Excel’s consolidation features to combine data that has same shape (ie same number & type of columns). Here is one way to do it.

But what if we need to consolidate data that is in different shapes?

Something like above.

In such cases, we can use 3 powerful tools.

Multiple Consolidation Ranges – Pivot Tables
VBA
Power Query

So let’s examine how to use these approaches to consolidate data in different shapes.

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February 16, 2015

CP029: Impress your boss with Excel charts – 6 step road map for you

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In the 29th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s impress the boss with Excel charts.

What is in this session?

Many Excel charts live a short life. They spawn in an ambitious analyst’s spreadsheet. They go to boss with literally flying colors. The boss frowns, they disappear in to recycle bin.

Don’t curse your Excel charts with short life span.

Here is a 6 step road map to help you create awesome Excel charts, everytime.

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

Quick announcements about 50 ways & Einstein
6 step road map for charting success
ONE: Dig your data
TWO: Validate insights
THREE: Pick charts that go well
FOUR: Add title & message
FIVE: Remove clutter
SIX: Prompt action
A real life example with road map in action
Resources for creating awesome charts

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February 5, 2015

Custom Number Formats – Colors

Did you know you can use Excel 95-03 Color Names or Color Numbers in your Custom Number Formats in all Excel versions up to an including Excel 2013?

This post will show you how.

Read This »

February 3, 2015

2 Must watch Excel webinars for you

Just a quick announcement.

As you may know, I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics conference in Santa Clara this April (between 20th & 22nd). As a run up to the event, the good folks at PASS are conducting free webinars on various topics of Excel.

Here are 2 topics on which I am doing webinars. You can watch them and pick up some really cool Excel skills. Just click on below links to enjoy them.