How to find the lowest value? [Quick tip]
Lets say you are the head of purchasing department at Big Corp Co.
You are obviously very busy. Every day starting with a large cup of coffee and ends with a big smile, as you save your company thousands of $s by negotiating best deals, finding best providers and being awesome.
Today, let me share a small Excel tip with you that will make you even more awesome.
Never use simple numbers in your dashboards (bonus tip: how to fix default conditional formatting)
Pop quiz: What is wrong with above report?
At first glance, it looks alright. But if you observe closely, you realize that it is not telling the entire story. Just looking at regional sales numbers, you have not much clue what is going on with them.
So how to improve it?
Learn Top 10 Excel Features
Last week, we had a lovely poll on what are your favorite features of Excel? More than 120 people responded to it with various answers. So I did what any data analyst worth his salt would do,
I analyzed the data and here are the top 10 features in Excel according to you.
Read on to learn more.
How to create interactive calendar to highlight events & appointments [Tutorial]
One of the popular uses of Excel is to maintain a list of events, appointments or other calendar related stuff. While Excel shines easily when you want to log this data, it has no quick way to visualize this information. But we can use little creativity, conditional formatting, few formulas & 3 lines of VBA code to create a slick, interactive calendar in Excel. Today, lets understand how to do this.
Designing a dashboard to track Employee vacations [case study]


HR managers & department heads always ask, “So what is the vacation pattern of our employees? What is our average absent rate?”
Today lets tackle that question and learn how to create a dashboard to monitor employee vacations.
What do HR Managers need? (end user needs)
There are 2 aspects tracking vacations.
1. Data entry for vacations taken by employees
2. Status dashboard to summarize vacation data
To-do List with Priorities using Excel
A while ago, we published a new year resolution template. This was a hit with our reader with thousands of you downloading it. During last week, Peppe, one of our readers from Italy, took this template and made it even more awesome.
The original template had tasks and completion check mark. As you finish each task, you can see the progress bar moving.
Peppe added priorities to this. With his new version, progress is measured based on how much priority we assigned that particular task. Pretty neat eh?!?
People & Websites that Helped me in 2012 [Thank you message]
2012 has been the most awesome year since we started Chandoo.org.
The credit for this goes to our community of Excel users – that is you.
For practically every day of 2012, you have inspired me (and all of us at Chandoo.org) to learn something new, share and make you awesome. I know I say this many times, but I can never feel enough – Thank you for your support to Chandoo.org.
Apart from you, there are many other amazing people & companies that played a role in our success. In this post, let me highlight them & express my sincere gratitude.