All articles with 'downloads' Tag

Finally my Excel classes in USA are over. It was a lot of fun traveling to new cities, teaching Excel & dashboards to enthusiastic crowds and making new friends. As if that is not fun enough, we (Jo, kids & I) are going on a 2,000 mile, 2 week road trip starting today.

Although I am enjoying all this, I also feel bad for not taking enough time to share new tricks, ideas & techniques with you here. So, I have a wacky, wild & awesome plan for you. Join us on our road trip.

That is right. You can join me on our road trip and see what I see, learn some pretty cool Excel tricks, all while sipping coffee and stretching legs in the comfort of your office cubicle.

We all have some projects to manage every now and then and there are needs of various trackers that help us in gauging the progress of the same. One of the most important things are heat maps that quickly help us in visually displaying the names of the projects that need special attention and resolve issues that are impacting them.

Lets say you are looking at some data as shown above and wondering what is the sum of budgets for top 3 projects in East region with Low priority. How would you do that with formulas?

This is interesting, I am in Columbus to meet one of my college friends. I remember him as a very meticulous person from college days. So it is no surprise when he showed me his massively impressive finance tracker last night. He has been tracking expenses, income, credit card payments and gas (petrol) consumption since 2008. Very impressive indeed.

Then out of blue he said, he has a problem with his spreadsheet. In this own words,

When entering data for credit cards, I use one column per card. But in my report view, I want to show credit card details in rows. How do I do this?

Something like above…. Today, lets learn how to do this using Excel formulas.

Hello there,

My travel to US was fantastic and fun. Many thanks to Jocelyn & Rob Collie, who found a nice apartment for us and made sure we are settled down in almost no time. Weather has been excellent so far too with lots of sunshine and blue skies. We went to a nearby park the other day and kids really loved walking on trials and exploring.

Gentle reminder

Today is last day to sign-up for my USA Masterclass

Today is last day to join my USA Advanced Excel & Dashboards masterclass with early bird discount. If you live near Chicago, Washington DC or Columbus and love Chandoo.org style of teaching, then you will benefit alot from my masterclass. We have very few spots left in Chicago & Columbus. So go ahead and book yours today and save $200.

Click here to know more and join us.

Tony sends this chart and asks if it can be done in Excel.

It sounded like a good challenge for a lazy Sunday morning. So here we go. (Posting it on Monday).

Now I could not get an oil rig photo or that data. So I made up few numbers and used a photo of Flinders street station I took when I was in Melbourne last year.

Imagine you have a worksheet with lots of charts. And you want to make it look awesome & clean.

Solution?

Simple, create an interactive chart so that your users can pick one of many charts and see them.

Today let us understand how to create an interactive chart using Excel.

Livio, one of our readers from Italy sent me this interesting problem in email.

I would like to prepare an xy linear graphic as representation of the variation of temperature trough a wall between two different bulk temperature i.e. outside and inside a house. This graphic should show the temperature gradient trough the wall thickness. The wall is normally made by different construction materials (different layers, as bricks, insulation, …..) and so the temperature change but not as a straight line with only one slope, instead as few lines with different slopes (see below figure) Calculations are not difficult, and also prepare the graphic also not difficult.

But, I am looking a beautiful solution for x-axis. X-axis should be divided not with constant interval, instead with different length between each sub-division exactly as the different thickness of the wall. This is a correct graphic, because you can show the correct slope of each straight line though each layer of the wall.

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.

Do not worry, you are not time traveling or seeing things. Its just that, this year I have decided to publish our Easter Egg a few days early.

And oh, I have 3 reasons for it:

1. 2 of my favorite festivals – Easter & Holi (a festival of colors, celebrated in India) are this week. Holi is today (Wednesday) & Easter on Sunday.
2. My kids are super excited about Holi as this is the first time they will be playing it. So we have family time from today until Wednesday and I do not feel like writing a blog entry on Friday 🙂
3. I like to have 3 reasons for everything.

Hence the Easter Egg is advanced a few days. But it is just as fun (or may be better) as previous Easter eggs.

Recently, I had a peculiar problem. I have a list of zip codes and I wanted to find out nearest zip codes for each of them.

Now, If I wanted to find out near by zip codes for one area, I could go and search in Google. But, how to do it for dozens of them?

Today, lets understand how you can use Excel (that’s right) to do this automatically. We will be using Excel 2013 for this.

Today, lets understand how to use Calculated items feature in Pivot tables. We will use a practical problem many of us face to learn this feature – ie calculating conversion ratio from a list of sales calls.

Lets say you are responsible for sales of 100s of products (which belong to handful of categories). You are looking at sales of each product in last month & this month. And you want to understand whether sales are improving or declining by category. How would you do it?

Turns out, this is not a difficult problem. In fact, this question is asked every day & answered using Advances vs. Declines chart.

You may have seen this chart in financial newspapers or websites. Shown above, Advances vs. Declines chart tells us how many items have advanced & how many have declined.

Read on to learn how to create this chart using Excel.

Hi folks,

I have a quick announcement & an awesome Power Pivot technique 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 inaugural 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.

We will be closing the doors of this program at midnight, today (11:59 PM, Pacific time, Friday, 15th of February).

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

How many people have joined the class?

At the time of writing this, we have 195 students enrolled in Power Pivot class. We are eager to share Power Pivot knowledge & techniques to as many more of you as possible. So go ahead and join us because you want to be awesome in Excel & Power Pivot.

When comparing 2 sets of data, one question we always ask is,

• How is first set of numbers different from second set?

A classic example of this is, lets say you are comparing productivity figures of your company with industry averages. Merely seeing both your series as lines (or columns etc.) is not going to tell you the full story. But if we can shade our productivity line in red or green when it is under or above industry average… now that would be awesome! Something like above.