If only there is paste special for everything in life, things would be much more smoother and fun. Alas, the paste special is limited only to excel.

Here is a handy trick you can use to quickly scale up data validations set up in one cell to say a range of cells.

Just copy the cell by pressing CTRL+C and then go to the target cell(s) and press ALT+ESN. And your data validations are pasted in the new cells. That is all. Quick and Easy.

Check out an implementation of project dashboard along with tweetboard by our reader Fernando. He says, it “turned out to be a great success”. I am so happy for him.

Btw, the post includes a link to download the workbook so that you can see the dashboard and tweetboard in action.

We all know that data validation is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use data validation to create a drop-down list in a cell and limit the values user can enter. But, do you know that you can use data validation in a multitude of ways to prevent users from entering wrong data?

Here is a practical application: Prevent users from entering duplicate values in a range of cells.

For eg. you are making an invoice. Wouldn’t it be cool if Excel prompted you when you enter a duplicate line item so that increase the item quantity instead of repeating it.

Sanjay, my colleague is an avid programmer and excel enthusiast. In his spare time he wrote a small VBA macro to solve Sudoku. Sudoku is a very famous number based puzzle with a 9×9 grid of cells. Each of the 9 rows, columns and 3×3 blocks should be filled in such a way that they have all the numbers from 1 to 9. Sudoku is a very effective way to keep your brain cells ticking. I am a huge sudoku fan and I solve sudoku whenever I have few minutes to kill. So naturally I jumped with joy when I saw Sanjay’s excel macro for solving sudoku. He is kind enough to let me share this with all of you.

Debra at Contextures is having an Excel Fall Giveaway and you could get a free copy of Project Management Bundle by sharing your excel nightmare or excel costume idea. It is that simple. Go here. PS: the flight to Copenhagen was good, I am safe in Scandinavia, regular broadcasting should resume shortly.

< drum roll > Welcome Nakshatra and Nishanth to their first public appearance.Nakshatra is the girl and Nishanth is the boy (for the curious, Nakshatra means star and Nishanth means moon) Here is a fun question: Can you guess which one is Nishanth and which one is Nakshatra? On more family affairs, today I am […]

In our recent poll, I have asked you to tell me which buttons you have on the quick access toolbar?

Finnur, one of our readers has configured the Excel 2007 quick access toolbar to make it look like Excel 2003 toolbar.

I think this is a very cool way to max up your productivity, it takes 5 minutes to make your quick access bar look like Excel 2003 toolbar and you could save countless hours of “searching-for-that-command-in-ribbon” time.