Hiya folks… Got an exciting news to share with you all. Over the weekend, my YouTube channel hit 50,000 subscriber milestone.

Thank you so much for making me a part of your journey to awesomeness.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.