All articles with 'advanced excel' Tag

Today lets talk about how to build world-class dashboards.

What is a dashboard?

Dashboard reports allow managers to get high-level overview of the business and help them make quick decisions. A dashboard is usually a one page report that contains critical information for decision support.

How to make dashboards?

Excel is an excellent tool to make powerful dashboards that can provide analysis, insight and alert managers in timely manner. But creating a dashboard takes a lot of skill & practice. That is where a resource like Chandoo.org comes handy. In this site you can find more than 200 different dashboard examples, tutorials, samples and downloads – all designed to make you awesome.

Read on to learn more…

Dynamic dropdowns are a handy way to get your users to make choices based on what they’ve previously chosen, while steering them away from making invalid choices. Today we’re going to look at one that easily handles multiple levels, and we’ll take a look at what could go wrong. Let’s see one in action, shall […]

Hi friends & readers of Chandoo.org,

I am happy to tell you that my latest online course – Power Pivot class is now open for your consideration. Please take a few minutes to read about this course and how it can help you. If you are ready to join, please click here.

Power Pivot for Excel has come a long way since it was introduced in late 2009. In the last 4 years not only has the technology matured, but also became a standard reporting platform in many businesses. As a smart analyst (or manager), you will gain a lot of mileage by adding this vital skill to your resume.

Today, let me show 5 reasons why you should learn Power Pivot this year.

Blank cells are an invisible pain in the analysis. Dealing with them is frustrating, time consuming and often very complex. At chandoo.org, we are not big fans of blank cells. That is why we wrote:

• How to delete blank cells & rows?
• Dealing with blanks – case study
• Quickly filling blank cells in a table
• Extracting non-blank data from a list

Today, lets talk about one more scenario. Lets say you want to find out the first non-blank item in a list. How would you do it?

I have a confession to make.

I am not sure how to describe this new thing I made in Excel / VBA. So first take a look at it.

Read on to learn how you can create something like this using Excel & a little bit of VBA.

In this episode of Formula Forensics, lets talk about how to build a model where costs vary per year and age. In this example, we are talking about a plantation project. The costs & yields of plants vary by the year they are planted in and the age of plants. In this case, how do we calculate the total costs or returns with formulas?

Yesterday, I talked about how you don’t have to know how to code in order to highly leverage VBA. All you need to know is how to Google, Cut, and Paste. As discussed then, I ‘volunteered’ KV under pain of exposure to empty the contents of his secret satchel onto the virtual table, so that […]

You know, I‘m constantly amazed at the depth of knowledge and wisdom that comes up in the comments of this site. For instance, the other day, undercover Excel secret agent KV came up a great list of interview questions in response to Chandoo’s great article What are best Excel interview questions?

I particularly liked this one:
Do you have a Personal Macro Workbook setup ? If yes, what are the most common macros you use in your daily work?

Secret Agent KV obviously has some purpose-built gadgets that he employs to kill inefficiencies. And he obviously also knows the two top-secret reasons to keep code in a Personal Macro Workbook:

1. To keep it safe from international spy rings.
2. So you can whip it out whenever you are cornered by any evil-looking spreadsheet.

While that first point is important, that second is the clincher: code stored in a personal workbook can be unleashed with a simple judo-chop to the throat.

Today, lets understand how to setup your personal macro workbook and open a secret passage-way to Excel awesomeness.

Howdy again, folks. Jeff Weir here, borrowing the keys to the blog off Chandoo again. (Hopefully I don’t scratch it again). How remiss of me…jacob reminded me in the comments of my previous BLOATED post on good spreadsheet anti-bloat practices that I completely missed one of Excel’s newest and most efficient anti-bloat features: PowerPivot. So […]

How to Solve an Equation in Excel

Today lets get cozy. Lets start a fling (a very long one). Lets do something that will make you smart, happy and relaxed.

Don’t get any naughty ideas. I am talking about INDEX() formula.

INDEX?!?

Of all the hundreds of formulas & thousands of features in Excel, INDEX() would rank somewhere in the top 5 for me. It is a versatile, powerful, simple & smart formula. Although it looks plain, it can make huge changes to the way you analyze data, calculate numbers and present them. It is so important that, whenever I teach (live or online), I usually dedicate 25% of teaching time to INDEX().

Enough build up. Lets get cozy with INDEX.

Using Arrays To Update Table Columns We are creating a lot of reports everyday and these reports contain a lot of data which is presented in various styles as per the requirements. The data that allows us to create the reports is usually referred as raw data and in most of the cases is stored […]

Hi folks,

I have a quick announcement & a creative dashboard to share with you. First the announcement.

Only few hours left to join our Power Pivot course…

As you may know, I have opened enrollments for our 2nd batch of Power Pivot course few days ago. The aim of this course is to make you awesome in Excel, Advanced Excel, Dashboards, Power Pivot & Advanced Power Pivot.

We will be closing the doors of this program at midnight, today (11:59 PM, Pacific time, Friday, 16th of August).

If you want to join us, click here and enroll now.

Hello friends..,

I have 2 things for you:

• Details about our upcoming Power Pivot courses
• A short video about designing better dashboards.