All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

Well here’s something I never knew until today…I was watching one of Mike ExcelIsFun Girvin’s great YouTube videos from his great Slaying Excel Dragons series – the one on Excel 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts – when he showed how to do the equivalent of a mouse right click using a key on the keyboard that I’d […]

Blank cells are an invisible pain in the analysis. Dealing with them is frustrating, time consuming and often very complex. At chandoo.org, we are not big fans of blank cells. That is why we wrote:

• How to delete blank cells & rows?
• Dealing with blanks – case study
• Quickly filling blank cells in a table
• Extracting non-blank data from a list

Today, lets talk about one more scenario. Lets say you want to find out the first non-blank item in a list. How would you do it?

Ever wondered how to go from a bunch of cells with text to one big combined text? Like shown above.

Well, there is a simple trick. One of our readers, Grant shared this with us. Read on to learn this.

Today lets have a poll. Lets debate if this pie chart about world elections in 2014 is good or bad.

First lets take a look at the chart

This chart, published by The Economist talks about how 42% of the world population is going to vote this year. Take a look and read on to learn how you can re-create this in Excel.

Bar & Column charts are very useful for comparison. Here is a little trick that can enhance them even more.

Lets say you are looking at sales of various products in a column chart. And you want to know how sales of a given product compare with a lower bound (last year sales) and an upper bound (competition benchmark). By adding these boundary markers, your chart instantly becomes even more meaningful.

Lets learn how to create a column chart with lower & upper bounds in this tutorial.

Sometime during the 2nd half of 2013, I finished 10 years of Excel usage. In the last 10 years, I completed my studies, got my first job, married, had kids, visited 15 different countries, quit my job to start a business, bought first car, first house, made dozens of new friends, read 100s of books, wrote a book and learned 1000s of new things. And all along, Excel stayed a true companion. Right from MBA entrance exam preparation in 2003 to making my summer internship project reports in 2005 to planning my wedding expenses in 2007 to getting a promotion in 2009 to planning my kids feeding schedule in 2010 to running a successful business in 2014, Excel helped me in every step.

So today, I want to tell you the top 10 things I learned using Excel in last decade. Grab a hot cup of coffee, buckle your belts and get ready for time travel.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2014 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.

This year has been busiest year since inception of Chandoo.org. Wow, that is 10 years in a row of breaking previous records.

We had 101 posts, 7,400+ comments this year. Since our forum went thru a migration, I could not gather exact stats for forum. We have trained more than 2,500 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & Power Pivot classes.

More than 7.5 million people visited our site in last 1 year (up 14%) and consumed a whopping 20 million pages (up 16%). Each of these visitors spent an average of 2 minutes 21 seconds on our site becoming awesome in Excel. There are 1.8 million people who spent at least 15 minutes on our site.

We have added more than 25,000 members to our newsletter / RSS reader community, crossing 80,000 mark. It is a busy year.

Read on to find the best of Chandoo.org in 2013.

2103 has been the most awesome year since starting Chandoo.org.

This year, more than 10 million people have visited Chandoo.org and took steps to become awesome. Every day of 2013 felt blessed, inspired and wholesome, thanks to your support, love and kindness. Thanks to my travels (USA & Malaysia), I could meet hundreds of our readers face to face and get to know them better.

Many many thanks to you for your support in 2013.

Apart from you, my reader, there are many others who helped me in the year 2013. This message is my way of thanking them.

Hello awesome readers of Chandoo.org,

I wish you a merry Christmas & very happy New Year 2014. May your holidays be filled with joy and warmth. And your new year with lots of hope, fun, strength and awesomeness.

I also want to tell you how thankful & fortunate I feel to have your support in this year. Your desire to learn Excel & become awesome at your work motivates me everyday to learn & share. 2013 is a memorable year in my life because of you. Thank you.

If this Excel problem is a Bollywood (Indian movie) plot, it would go like this:

Situation: Your boss gave you a worksheet. It has a lot of number chunks. And you need to calculate the sum of each chunk. Quickly!

Twist #1: The villain (your boss, who else) has abducted your spouse. For every extra hour you spend on the problem, your boss will make your spouse go thru one of the boring 97 slide strategy presentations. And his laptop is full of those strategy presentations.

Twist #2: The F1 key on your keyboard is missing.

Twist #3: The coffee machine in your floor is broken again.

Twist #4: And just when you are pressing CTRL+S, the movie steers in to an item song.

—-

Fortunately, no one abducted your spouse. And hopefully the coffee machine is working. But the Excel problem remains unsolved.

Learn how to Count Text, Blanks and Non-Blank cells with this Countif() Quick Tip

We are almost at the end of 2013. Time to review how much more awesome we became this year. Today let me ask you a very simple question.

What is the coolest Excel trick you have learned this year?

Go ahead and post your answers using comments.

You have been there. You are looking at a complex workbook with some hidden rows /columns. You want to know what is in that hidden cells. Alas, the worksheet is protected.

It is like the special coffee machine on top floor reserved for senior executives. You know it is there, but you cannot get to it. Now what?!?

Simple. Follow this process.

(I am talking about hidden cells, not the coffee machine.)

Triangular plot…! What is it?

Recently, a Chandoo.org forum member asked this,

‘I want to be able to make a graph that, in some aspects, looks like below, but I have no idea how to do it at all.’

After seeing it, I said to myself in Barney Stinson’s tone, ‘Challenge Accepted!‘

The final plot looks like above. Read on to learn how this is made.