Let’s take a whirlwind trip to coolest little capital – Wellington. It is a windy place, so hold on to your hats and spreadsheets.

Almost everyone who spends more than 2 days in Wellington would agree that it is a windy place. But how windy is Welly? In this two part series, we will use Power Query, Excel charts and coffee to answer that question.

But, first let’s start with a joke.

What happens when you throw a boomerang in Frank Kitts Park?

You will have to buy another one, coz you are not getting that one back.

Let’s start the new year with a bang.

Excel Tables were introduced more than a decade ago, but a lot of people don’t know them or under utilize them. So start this year by becoming a very table genius.

What is Excel Table?

Excel tables are a simple and elegant way to structure and store your data. Let’s say you have staff details like below. Instead of calling it like A1:E72, you can convert this data in to a table and call it, you guessed it right, covfefe (or more coherent option like – staff).

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2018 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calendar has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

Hellow there…

I wish you a merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2018. May your holidays be filled with joy, togetherness, celebrations and fulfillment. May your new year be filled with hope, energy and awesomeness.

I want to tell you how thankful I am for all your support in this year. Each time you click, visit, read, comment, share, view, listen, purchase, subscribe, follow, question, discuss or email, my heart is filled with gratitude and happiness. Thank you for all the love and support. 2017 has been another amazing year in Chandoo.org journey and I owe this to you.

‘Tis Friday and it is too hot in my home office to stand and type a longish post. So, let’s keep this skirtish (short and pretty).

How would you calculate long service bonus?

Let’s say you are HR manager at BigLargeInc. and you are looking at Julia’s service details. You have her employment start date, current date, her leave without pay details, as shown below.

You need to calculate how many days of continuous service Julia had (ie total service – duration on leave without pay). How would you write the formula?

Time for another round of unconditional love. Today, let’s learn about conditional formatting top tips. It is one of the most useful and powerful features in Excel. With just a few clicks of conditional formatting you can add powerful insights to your data. Ready to learn the top tips? Read on.

Imagine you are the first officer at ship terminal αε974F1 on remote planet Alderaan. Your job involves looking at terminal log to see anomalies in time space continuum. So one day after getting to work late, thanks to crazy traffic on the floating super way in your settlement, you are looking at latest terminal log for αε974F1 on Excel (of course Excel, what else are you going to use? Notepad?!?) and want to check all the records logged at 7 AM on any day. You don’t have all the time in universe to filter records one at a time. You don’t want to write a formula or something else as it is too early in the morning and the nearest Starbucks is 7 light years away. So what would you do?

Use filters of course.