All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

Today is Holi, the festival of colors in India. It is a fun festival where people smear each other with colors, water balloons, tomatoes and sometimes rotten eggs. This year we wanted to play with only water guns, but kids vetoed that idea vehemently. So we ended up driving to my sister-in-law’s place to play with colors (there were no rotten eggs or tomatoes, thankfully).

Let me smear a few colors on you

I would love to splash a jug full of color water on you and say Happy Holi. But the internets have not advanced thus far. So I am going to give you the next best option.

An Excel workbook to play holi

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In the 31st session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s disappear.

What is in this session?

Spreadsheets are complex things. They have outputs, calculation tabs, inputs, VBA code, from controls, charts, pivot tables and occasional picture of hello kitty. But when it comes to making a workbook production ready, you may want to hide away few things so it looks tidy.

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

• Quick announcements first anniversary of our podcast etc.
• Hiding cells, rows, columns & sheets
• Hiding chart data points
• On/off effect with form controls, conditional formatting
• Making objects, charts, pictures disappear
• Disabling grid-lines, formula bar & headings
• Hiding things in print

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In the 30th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s learn how to uncover fraud in data.

What is in this session?

In the wake of hedge fund scams, accounting frauds and globalization, We, analysts are constantly second guessing every source of data. So how do you answer a simple question like, “am I being lied to?” while looking at a set of numbers your supplier has sent you.

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

• Quick announcements about 50 ways & 200k BRM
• Introduction to fraud detection
• 5 techniques for detecting fraud
  • Benford’s law
  • Auto correlation
  • Discontinuity at zero
  • Analysis of distribution
  • Learning systems & decision trees
• Implementing these techniques in Excel
• A word of caution

Who is the most consistent of all?

Imagine you are a category manager at a large e-commerce company. Your site offers various products, but you don’t really make these products. You list products made by other vendors on your site. Every day, these vendors would send you invoices for the amount of product they have sold. Above is a snapshot of such invoices.

Looking at this list, you have a few questions.

1. Who is the best seller?
2. Who is the most active seller?
3. Who is the most consistent seller?
4. Which seller has fewest invoices?

Let’s go ahead and answer these using Excel. Shall we?

Situation: Our commissions are growing way faster than revenues
Let’s say you are looking revenues & sales commissions of your company for last few years. The data looks like this:

And you want to highlight the fact that commissions are growing faster than revenues.

So you plot YoY growth rates for revenues & commissions.

Problem: The chart of YoY growth rates is not convincing

Take a look at the chart. It doesn’t convey the message that we want. At best it says “revenue growth is less than commission growth”

How to convey the message “Commission growth is a problem for us”?

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In the 29th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s impress the boss with Excel charts.

What is in this session?

Many Excel charts live a short life. They spawn in an ambitious analyst’s spreadsheet. They go to boss with literally flying colors. The boss frowns, they disappear in to recycle bin.

Don’t curse your Excel charts with short life span.

Here is a 6 step road map to help you create awesome Excel charts, everytime.

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

• Quick announcements about 50 ways & Einstein
• 6 step road map for charting success
• ONE: Dig your data
• TWO: Validate insights
• THREE: Pick charts that go well
• FOUR: Add title & message
• FIVE: Remove clutter
• SIX: Prompt action
• A real life example with road map in action
• Resources for creating awesome charts

Just a quick announcement.

As you may know, I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics conference in Santa Clara this April (between 20th & 22nd). As a run up to the event, the good folks at PASS are conducting free webinars on various topics of Excel.

Here are 2 topics on which I am doing webinars. You can watch them and pick up some really cool Excel skills. Just click on below links to enjoy them.

1. 5 Dashboard mistakes to avoid (watch it any time)
2. Excel charting – productivity tips (live on February 3rd)

That is all for now. See you in the webinar.

Here is a fun problem to think about.

Let’s say you are looking at some data like above.

And you want to find out what is the longest streak of wins in the list.

How do you calculate it?

bonus question: What formula calculates when the longest streak began?

Imagine you are the in-charge of finance department at Hogwarts. So one fine day, while you are practicing the spells, Dumbledore walks in to your office and says, “Our electricity bills are way too high. As the muggles don’t accept wizard money, we have to find a way to reduce our power consumption.”

So you summoned the previous 12 month utility bills to examine energy consumption patterns, and pretty soon you realized that most of the electricity consumption is due to the light bulbs. You suddenly have a brilliant idea. Why not replace the light bulbs with a variety that consumes low power? A light bulb moment indeed.

Your next step is to figure out what varieties of light bulbs are out there. Fortunately this is easier than catching a snitch in a game of quidditch. A quick search revealed that there are 3 types of light bulbs:

• Regular incandescent bulbs (the kind Hogwarts currently uses)
• Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFL)
• Light Emitting Diode bulbs (LED)

Now your job is to do a cost benefit analysis of these options and pick one.

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In the 28th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s figure out how to express business rules & logic to Excel.

What is in this session?

What good are spreadsheets if they can’t solve business problems?

But we all struggle when it comes to modeling real world business conditions in Excel. For example, if you have below business rule to decide how much discount to offer a customer,

• If the customer bought 3 or more times previously and offer 15% discount
• If the customer bought 1 or 2 times previously AND customer’s age is >40, offer 10% discount
• If the customer visited our New York store between 6PM-9PM offer 5% discount
• Else no discount

How would you go about modeling these in Excel?

That is our topic for this podcast session.

In this podcast, you will learn

• The challenge of modeling business logic & rules in Excel
• My struggles with such formulas in early days
• 4 features of Excel that can help you with this.
• Example business rules & how to write formulas

If you are an Excel enthusiast, here is a feast for you.

Just a small glitch, it is a not feast you enjoy with mouth, it is a feast you consume with eyes, ears & mind.

It gives me immense pleasure to invite you to this feast.

When you are a “work from home” dad, you can see a lot of patterns. Here is one.

My kids come home from school by noon (they are too young for full day school). Right after lunch they watch their favorite cartoon program, Team Umizoomi, in which few fictional characters go about solving problems in the Umi city using maths. Milli, one of the characters is an expert with patterns. She solves problems by identifying patterns and unleashing pattern power. 

Team Umizoomi & Excel Fill – How do they link up?

Here is how they link up.

Imagine you have a workbook where you need to follow a pattern, like above.

You too can unleash the pattern power. What more… you needn’t break in to a song sequence every-time you unleash the power.

A little late to the party, but nevertheless right on track.

As Chandoo.org starts another year of making you awesome, I want to take a few minutes of your time to understand how I can help you better this year?

Please answer this 1 question survey for me.
If you do not see the form below, please click here

This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar. 

Why do so many of us use Excel? Let’s trace it back to the ’80s when Microsoft hit gold by being the first out of the blocks with the widely available operating system that was somewhat dummy proof.

Suddenly everyone could aspire to launch ‘Nukes’ like a fresh faced Matthew Broderick in the film ‘War Games’. 

By the early 90’s Windows had become even more established relative to other Operating Systems, so much so that PC manufacturers were developing components around Windows’ capabilities and suddenly PCs were Windows machines. As big business began accepting the significance of computing, Microsoft started winning huge licensing contracts with all the major corporations in all sectors, but the Finance sector in particular, where Excel would be king, was having an exponential boom at this time. For big organisations, once you spent a fortune buying licences for the Operating System it only made sense to purchase the seamlessly integrated and carefully developed/tested apps to run on them; enter Excel, Word, PowerPoint and eventually Outlook. Fast forward to 2015 and we are firmly in the age of second generation corporate professionals who have developed much of their productivity skill sets around those particular Windows tools. While all the excellent tools have their place, Excel stands out and here are 8 reasons why you need to up your Excel game more than ever this year.

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In the 27th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s pave way for an awesome 2015.

We are going to talk about 15 proven strategies for making you awesome in Excel & Your work.

What is in this session?

We all get fresh dose of energy, enthusiasm & drive during new years. So we aim for bigger & more awesome things. But once the first few weeks are over, we just settle down to the normal rhythm and forget about these big, hairy & audacious goals.

Let’s make 2015 different. In this podcast, Let’s understand how you can become awesome in Excel & your work this year, with 15 proven strategies:

• Announcements – my new year & plans for next few months
• Becoming awesome – 3 important areas of focus
• Learning
  • New formulas
  • New features
  • Different charts
  • Macros
  • Linkup Excel with other software
  • Get a book
  • Join a course
• Application
  • Take up a work project
  • Consulting
  • Mimic a chart in Excel
  • Beyond XL – Power Pivot etc.
• Sharing
  • Forums
  • Helping a colleague
  • Comment on blogs
  • Train your team