All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

So who is up for a challenge? Can you use only formulas and extract dates buried inside text?

1. Download this file.
2. In column C, write a formula such that you can extract the date in column B
3. If you succeed, post your solution here as a comment.
4. If you fail, drink some coffee, start afresh.

During London 2012 Olympics, Usain Bolt reached the 100mts finish line faster than anyone in just 9.63 seconds. Most of us would be still reading this paragraph before Mr. Bolt finished the race.

To put this in perspective, NY Times created a highly entertaining interactive visualization. Go ahead and check it out. I am sure you will love it.

So I wanted to create something similar in Excel. And here is what I came up with.

Watching the Olympic athletes run & jump all I could think of is,

• What should I eat to jump & sprint like that?
• How come I never heard about steeple chase?
• Should we really have 3 bullet points in all lists?

But I digress. Coming back, when watching one of those hurdles events, I got an idea as sharp as Chinese table tennis team.

Why not create a hurdles game in Excel to measure how good you are with keyboard?

So ladies & gentleman, let me present you our very own Olympics hurdle run.

Recently, we published 66 dashboards visualizing Excel salaries around the world. Each of the contestants have put in great effort and hand-crafted these beauties. Now its time we picked a winner.

How does the voting work?

The voting has 2 components

1. Readers (that is you) pick a winner and runner-up using online voting.
2. Judges (2 of them) will also pick winners. Judges vote carries 20% weight.

Everyone likes to be in control. Even my 2 year old daughter jumps with joy when she lays her hands on TV remote. She pushes the buttons and assumes it is working. It is another story that we rarely watch TV at home.

By adding an element of control, we can make our dashboard reports fun. Interactive elements like form controls, slicers etc. invite users to play with your dashboard, get involved and understand data by asking questions. That is why I recommend making dashboards interactive.

Today lets understand how you can make dashboards interactive.

Whenever we deal with large amounts of data, one of the goals for analysis is, How is this data distributed?

This is where a Box plot can help. According to Wikipedia, a box plot is a convenient way of graphically depicting groups of numerical data through their five-number summaries: the smallest observation (sample minimum), lower quartile (Q1), median (Q2), upper quartile (Q3), and largest observation (sample maximum)

Today, let us learn how to create a box plot using MS Excel. You can also download the example workbook to play with static & interactive versions of box plots.

Ladies & gentleman, put on your helmets. This is going to be mind-blowingly awesome.

See how many different ways are there to analyze Excel salary data. Look at these 66 fantastic, beautifully crafted dashboards and learn how to one up your dashboard awesomeness quotient.

Welcome to Chandoo.org. Thank you so much for taking time to visit us.

Over the last few weeks, we have quite a few new members to the site. Its good time I said hello and introduced this site to you.

PS: If you have been following chandoo.org for a while, you can still find useful information in this post. So read on.

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:

On 14th July, evening 4:51 PM (GMT), Chandoo.org received its 20,000th comment. 20,000!
The lucky commenter was Ishav Arora, who chimed, “Like super computers…Excel is a super calculator!!!!” in our recent poll.

It took us 8 years & 15 days since the very first comment to get here. And it took just 1 year 7 months & 23 days to add the last 10,000 comments (we had our 10,000th comment on 21st November, 2010).

Out of curiosity, I wanted to understand more about these 20,000 comments. So I downloaded our comment database, dumped it in Excel and start analyzing.

Hi there,

How was your weekend? We had lovely weather. So spent most of the time playing with kids, running some errands & relaxing.

I just want to give you a quick update about our Financial Modeling School. We will be hiking course fees for this program starting tomorrow midnight (Tuesday, 17 July – 11:50 Pacific Time).
If you have been considering to join this program, please go ahead and enroll now to save money.

Click here for course details & Sign-up instructions.

When I was in Perth, I visited Hui’s house one day. Lovely, Hui’s daughter (who is about 14) asked Hui how he knew me. So Hui told that we both share a passion for Excel and that;s how we got to know each other. Then she asked, What is Excel?

At this point, we both tried to explain what Excel is to her in a few ways with no success. Later Hui came up with a brilliant explanation.

He said, Excel has lots of small calculators all interconnected, so that you can do any sort of calculation.

So here is a challenge for you. How would you explain Excel to a small kid (computer literate, but not yet in college).

When looking at a big table of analysis (or data), it would make our life simpler if the selected cell’s column and row are highlighted, so that we can instantly compare and get a sense of things. Like above.

Who doesn’t like a little highlighting. So lets learn how to do highlighting today.

Did I tell you I love tennis? Some of my personal heroes & motivators are tennis players. And as you can guess, I admire Roger Federer. Watching him play inspires me to achieve more. So last night when he lifted Wimbledon trophy for 7th time, I wanted to celebrate the victory too, in my style. So I made an interactive timeline chart in Excel depicting his victory.

Jo (wife) likes to watch Masterchef Australia, a cooking reality show every night. Even though I do not find contestant’s culinary combats comforting, occasionally I just sit and watch. You see, I like food.

The basic premise of the program is who cooks best in given time. To tell people how much time is left, they use a clock that indicates how much time is left (much like a stop clock, with a small twist).

One day, while watching such intense battle, my mind went

It be cool to make such a clock using hmm… Excel?

While I cannot share my snapper (or pretty much any other food item) with you, I can share my Masterchef style Excel clock with you. So behold,