All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

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

Want to write formulas faster? Here is a quick tip.

Use Auto-correct!

That is right. Excel’s auto-correct feature can be setup to help you write formulas faster. See above demo. Read on for details.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2015 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calender has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

2014 has been the busiest year since starting Chandoo.org. Wow, that is 11 years of breaking previous records. Thank you. In 2014, we published 128 posts (up 27% YoY), received 6,000+ comments (down 19%). Our forum had 8,700+ new members, 6,650 new threads and more than 42,000 posts in 2014. This year, I have also launched Chandoo.org podcast. […]

2014 has been the most awesome year since starting Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for making it happen. This year, more than 10 million people visited our site, learned something and took first step to become awesome in their work. Each & every day of 2014 felt invigorating, exciting & blessed. I could meet 100s of you face to face during my travels to Houston & Dallas in September this year.

A big thanks to you, my reader, for supporting me and choosing chandoo.org as partner in your journey to awesomeness.

Apart from our readers, there are also countless people, websites, books, companies which helped me have a fantastic year. This message is my way of saying thanks to them.

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A big, warm & pleasant hello to you.

I wish you a merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2015. May your holidays be filled with joy, togetherness, celebrations and fulfillment. May your new year be filled with hope, energy and awesomeness.

I want to tell you how thankful I am for all your support in this year. Every time you visit our website, read an article, leave a comment, enroll in a course, purchase a product, read one of my books, listen to a podcast episode, watch a video or tell your friends about Chandoo.org, I feel nothing but gratitude, thankfulness and amazement. 2014 is the most successful year since starting Chandoo.org, all thanks to you. Heartfelt thanks to you, from my family, staff and volunteers.

About this year’s holiday card

We took this picture recently when we went to Udaipur (a city in northern India). For a change, no one closed their eyes when the camera clicked.

A holiday gift for you…

Read on to download your special holiday gift.

We analysts like to compare. If you ever want to keep an analyst busy, just give her 2-3 options. She won’t return to your desk until the cows come home. My wife uses this trick all the time. Picture this:

[In late 2013]
Me: I want to buy a new phone
She: Do you want Nexus 5 or Galaxy S5 or iPhone 5s?

Its late 2014 and I am not done comparing.

So today, let’s talk about an interesting comparison scenario.

Comparing by letter or word

See above demo to understand the concept. Read more to learn how to do this.

This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar.

August 29, 1994. A day that changed my life forever. Football World Cup? Russia and China de-targeting nuclear weapons against each other? Anniversary of the Woodstock festival?

No, much bigger: Two Undertakers show up at WWE Summerslam for an epic battle. Needless to say: MIND() = BLOWN().

And thus begun one boy’s journey into understanding the phenomenon of Multiple Occurrences.

My journey continued, when just a few years later my grandfather handed me down a precious family heirloom: A few columns of meaningless data that I could take away and analyze in Excel. You may laugh but in the 90’s, every boy only wanted two things 1) Lists of pointless data and …

Hello folks, how are you?

I have an announcement for you.

It is almost holiday time. Every year, Chandoo.org celebrates holidays with a 3 day sale on our most popular product – Excel School training program. The sale for this year will be,

10th December to 12th December (Wednesday to Friday)

What is on sale?

You will be able to save $30, $50 or $100 on our most popular courses

• Excel School + Dashboards program ($30 discount)
• Excel School + VBA + Dashboards ($50 discount)
• Excel School + VBA + Power Pivot + Dashboards ($100 discount)

More details & links for Sale page will be available on 10th of December. Stay tuned.

Excel Links

It has been a while since we had a round of Excel links. Here are some cool tips & links for you.

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In the 26th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s learn all about Excel !@#$%^+/*(}][<.

I am talking about Excel operators, you silly.

What is in this session?

Do you know Excel has more than 25 operators? That is right. There are a variety of operators beyond the simple + – * and /.

In this podcast, let’s understand all about these operators and how to use them. You will learn,

• Why there is a gap between last & this podcast session
• About Excel operators
• Arithmetic operators
• Text operators
• Reference operators
• Comparison operators
• Closing thoughts

Today, lets talk about an interesting extension to the idea of in-cell charts. Adding average or target markers to the chart.

Adding a marker (like average or target or last year value) can enhance your charts greatly and provide more context. Lets understand how to add marker symbols to in-cell charts.

Recently my iPhone 4 crashed. It is 3.5 years old. And just like any other 3 year old, it started acting weird & crazy one night. The next morning it went silent. It won’t go beyond the Apple logo whenever I start it. Since I couldn’t wait for the phone to start, I took out the SIM card (the phone is unlocked, if you are wondering) and placed it in my old Nokia phone. But alas, none of my contacts are on the SIM. They are in “cloud”.

After a day of answering phone calls from everyone including my mom as “Chandoo here”, I’ve decided to get my contacts back. So I logged in to iCloud to download a backup. And the backup was a .VCF file.

Since I wanted to have all my contact numbers in a spreadsheet, I did what any Excel nerd would do. I built a template that can convert VCF data to Excel worksheet.

Imagine you run a cute little pastry in Rome (Italy). To boost the sales you have a 2 person sales team. Caterina & Antonio. Caterina is the manager & Antonio, her assistant. Apart from basic salary, they will also receive sales commission. This comes from a portion of net profit allocated to “incentive pool”. The […]

Excel 2013, the newest version of Excel as of writing this has many great features like data modeling, improved pivot tables, power view, flash fill etc. But one thing that I find very annoying is the Open & Save experience. Any time we open a file or save a workbook (which happens alot everyday), we must navigate the painful backstage screen to select our favorite folders. You see, Excel 2013 supports cloud saving. So that means, by default it will show your Office 365 or OneDrive or SkyDrive or whatever fancy new name Microsoft has for these things. But I am not so much in to clouding. Heck, I see a passing cloud in the sky and I almost run inside my house. So what to do?

Simple. We can turn off these features.