All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

Today we will learn about Pivot Table Report Filters.

We all know that Pivot Tables help us analyze and report massive amount of data in little time. Excel has several useful pivot table features to help us make all sorts of reports and charts.

Report Filters are one such thing.

Many of you have emailed and asked me, “Chandoo, can you help us learn VBA too? Just like you do with Excel.”

Well, as flattering as those requests were, the fact is, I was lousy at VBA. Well, I used to be very good at Visual Basic, back in the college days. But my programming skills have rusted over the years as I did very little coding. I guess, I have become a business-guy. So it took me time to re-learn VBA. And now, I am happy to announce that We are ready to start our very first batch of VBA Class.

But, before we start, I need some help from you. I want to know what is it that you want to learn, so that we can design the course curriculum & methodology around your needs.

So please take a few minutes and complete this survey:

click here to the survey.

I know I am late to the party, but better late than…, uh! forget it.

As the keen readers of our blog knew, I like cricket and I show my enthusiasm by making an excel dashboard (or info-graphic) whenever Indian team reaches a major milestone. So naturally, I was super excited when we won the ICC World cup 2011. Last time Indian won the event was in 1983 and my idea of a dashboard at that time was a bottle of milk and jingo-bell, my favorite shake-to-make-annoying-noise toy. I think our latest world-cup victory deserves something more than that. So here we go.

How to make a 5 Star Chart (Similar to Amazon)

Last week Chandoo presented Give more details by showing average and distribution

At the top of the post was a small screen capture from Amazon.com showing a 5 Star chart showing that Twilight had a 3.5 Star Rating (way over-rated if you ask me).

I received an email shortly afterwards from Rajiv, “How can I make one of those charts ? ” with the Stars Circled

It’s actually very simple and this post will show you how.

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“.

Yesterday, we have seen a beautiful example of how showing details (like distribution) on-demand can increase the effectiveness of your reports. Today, we will learn how to do the same in Excel.

When we have lots of data, we try to summarize it by calculating the average. As they say, averages are mean, they do not give away much.

I want to share with you an interesting example from Amazon.com on how they give more details by combining average with distribution.

As you might know, Amazon shows the rating of each of the products they sell. Customers & users rate the products from 1 to 5 stars. When you visit the product page you will see the average rating. But there is a small down-arrow next to it. When you click on it, Amazon shows you the break-up of that rating so you have a better idea of how the ratings are split.

Wow, what a weekend it has been. Indian cricket team has won Cricket world cup 2011. It has been a highly entertaining tournament and the finals were just incredible.

Congratulations to Team India for winning Cricket World-cup 2011.

I am tempted to make a dashboard of sorts to show the journey of Team India in this world cup. But I could not get much time to work on anything. I will post something this week to celebrate the victory.

Read the rest of this post to get 5 recommended Excel resources to learn new things.

During last one week, we had a gala time with Dashboard Week on chandoo.org. To wrap-up the week, I am sharing a list of recommended resources, websites, tutorials & ideas for making dashboards.

Recommended Resources on Making Dashboards:
I have broken down this post in to various sections. Click on the links to quickly access the part you want to know or just keep scrolling to get the whole thing.

1. Books on Dashboards
2. Websites for Learning about Dashboards
3. Dashboard Training Programs
4. Add-ins & Software to Make Dashboards
5. Dashboard Tutorials & Downloads on Chandoo.org

In 2008, I received an email from Robert Mundigl, which was the start of a life-long friendship. Robert asked me if he can teach us how to make KPI dashboards using Excel. I gladly said yes because I am always looking for new ways to use Excel.

The original KPI dashboards using Excel article was so popular. They still help around 12,000 people around the globe every month. Many of our regular readers and members have once started their journey on Chandoo.org from these articles.

In this article, we will revisit the dashboard and give it a fresh new spin using Excel 2007.

Purpose of the dashboard:

This is a guest article written by John for our Excel Dashboard Week.

This Dashboard was constructed for a number of reasons, one of which was to reduce the number of reports produced with the same data ( up to 6 separate files ). As we all know, when it comes to senior management and reports / files the more information they can get on one report / file the better for them. So, with this in mind I created the Dashboard to show the data they need to see “quickly” each week.

Early in Jan, I got this mail from Mara, a student in Excel School first batch.

Hi Chandoo,

I took your first Excel batch class and loved it. I created a dynamic and interactive dashboard for my work. My boss thinks it’s an excellent tool and I have you to thank for and also Francis Chin who shared his travel dynamic dashboard. I integrated things you taught so thanks so much!

I felt very proud reading her email, so I asked her if she can share the dashboard with some dummy data so that we all can learn from her example.

Being a lovely person Mara is, she gladly emailed me the workbook and I am thrilled to include it in Dashboard Week.

As part of Dashboard Week, in this post, we will take a look at Health-care Dashboard prepared and shared by Alberto. He put together an excellent dashboard to visualize hospital performance and understand what is going on. Read this post to understand how this dashboard is made, watch a tutorial video & download example workbook.

Thank you Alberto for sharing the file & helping us learn.

Hello there,

I am glad to announce this week (21-25 March, 2011) as Dashboard Week on Chandoo.org
What happens in Dashboard Week?
As you can guess, during this week, I will be posting exclusively about Excel Dashboards. This is the tentative agenda … []

There are beautiful, powerful & awesome charting examples all around us. Today, I want to show you how we can harness the power of Excel to create Analytical Charts.

Analytical What?!?

To be frank, I do not know what to call these charts, so I choose the term Analytical Charts. But this is what I have in mind when I say Analytical charts:

A chart is analytical chart,
(1) If it is interactive
(2) It it can answer different questions by re-structuring same data differently