How to remove all cells containing John (or anything else) [Quick tip]
Here is an interesting question someone asked me recently,
If I have to delete all rows with “John” in it. Do you know how to do it?
Well, it looks like they really hate John. But it is none of my business.
So lets go ahead and understand a dead-simple way to get rid of all cells with John or whoever else you fancy.
Show only few rows & columns in Excel [Quick tip]
Each new sheet in MS Excel comes up with a 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. While it has a certain binary romantic ring to it (2^20 rows & 2^14 columns), I am yet to meet anyone using even half the number of rows & columns Excel has to offer.
So why leave all those empty rows & columns hanging in your reports?
Would it not look cool if your reports showed only few rows & columns as needed, like this:
Extracting numbers from text in excel [Case study]
Often we deal with data where numbers are buried inside text and we need to extract them. Today morning I had such task. As you know, we recently ran a survey asking how much salary you make. We had 1800 responses to it so far. I took the data to Excel to analyze it. And surprise! the numbers are a mess. Here is a sample of the data.
Thermo-meter chart with Marker for Last Year Value
During a recent training program, one of the students asked,
Thermo-meter chart is very good to show how actual value compares with target (or budget). But how can we add another point for say Last Year value to the chart with out cluttering it.
Something like above.
Sounds interesting? Read on
Sort Pivot Tables the way you want [Quick tip]
Ever looked at a Pivot table & wondered how you can sort it differently?
“If only I could show this report of monthly sales such that our best months are on top!”
Well, there is a way to do it without sacrificing 2 goats or pleasing the office Excel god. Just use custom sorting options in Pivot tables.
Shortcut for Long Models
Have you created models which run into 20 – 30 years? You might have noticed that navigating to the last year (the last column) is probably the most boring part (and also the most time consuming part). Excel does provide you a shortcut (Ctrl + end), but that hardly works! It’s been a while since […]
Auditing Spreadsheets? – Disable Direct Editing Mode to save time [quick tip]
For most of us, the prospect of inheriting a large, undisclosed sum of money is bleak. But we have high probability of inheriting a complex Excel workbook with 19 worksheets and 2300 rows of data and 195 formulas. The kind where entire rainbow colors are used to color code accounts receivable statuses. Then what do we do? We spend a whole afternoon (and then the rest of the month) breaking our head trying to figure out why the total revenues are only $ 41.2 million when profits are $ 99.23 million.
So how do we deal with our inheritance?
Here is a quick tip to help you get started. Disable “Direct editing mode“.