Unlock “Angy Formulas” – an Angry Birds like game hidden in Excel using this trick!!!
Sometimes you think you know something and then suddenly you are surprised. Yesterday was such a moment for me. I have been using Excel for almost a decade now. So naturally I assumed that I know it well. But then yesterday, while doing something I stumbled on a strange screen in Excel that looked like very popular Angry birds game. So I got searching. But there was no mention of it anywhere on net. Then I asked my friend Rollf ‘O’ Pai, who is in Micros0ft Execl team. First he denied such a thing. But we knew each other so well that he could never lie to me. So he confided. He told me what I had suspected for several years.
There is an Angry birds like video game buried in Excel!!! It was meant to be an Easter egg in Excel 2010 (and 2013), but due to backlash from senior management no one ever published the details about it.
So I asked him “How do I unlock it?”. Rollf ‘O’ Pai asked me to never reveal it to anyone and then told me the recipe.
Once I unlocked I could not believe how cool it is!
Read on to understand how to unlock this game.
There is an Easter egg in this chart!
Do not worry, you are not time traveling or seeing things. Its just that, this year I have decided to publish our Easter Egg a few days early.
And oh, I have 3 reasons for it:
- 2 of my favorite festivals – Easter & Holi (a festival of colors, celebrated in India) are this week. Holi is today (Wednesday) & Easter on Sunday.
- My kids are super excited about Holi as this is the first time they will be playing it. So we have family time from today until Wednesday and I do not feel like writing a blog entry on Friday 🙂
- I like to have 3 reasons for everything.
Hence the Easter Egg is advanced a few days. But it is just as fun (or may be better) as previous Easter eggs.
How well do you know your Lookups? [Quiz]
So you think you know VLOOKUP formula? Well, test your knowledge.
Click here to take our first ever quiz – on Look up formulas.
How to remove all cells containing John (or anything else) [Quick tip]
Here is an interesting question someone asked me recently,
If I have to delete all rows with “John” in it. Do you know how to do it?
Well, it looks like they really hate John. But it is none of my business.
So lets go ahead and understand a dead-simple way to get rid of all cells with John or whoever else you fancy.
Shading above or below a line in Excel charts [tutorial]
When comparing 2 sets of data, one question we always ask is,
- How is first set of numbers different from second set?
A classic example of this is, lets say you are comparing productivity figures of your company with industry averages. Merely seeing both your series as lines (or columns etc.) is not going to tell you the full story. But if we can shade our productivity line in red or green when it is under or above industry average… now that would be awesome! Something like above.
Transpose a table of data using Excel Formulas
Today lets tackle a familiar data clean-up problem using Excel – Transposing data.
That is, we want to take all rows in our data & make them columns. Something like this:
Learn these 4 techniques to transpose data:
1. Using Paste Special > Transpose
2. Using INDEX formula & Helper cells
3. Using INDEX, ROWS & COLUMNS formulas
4. Using TRANSPOSE Formula
Details about our Power Pivot Course [and a video for those of you not interested]
Hello folks,
If this article was a person, they would be schizophrenic. You see, it has 2 purposes:
- Give you all the details about my upcoming Power Pivot course
- Give you a solution to last week’s vacation days problem
Details about Power Pivot Course
Power Pivot, an Excel add-in makes it easy to connect, analyze & visualize massive amounts of data. This course aims to teach you how to use Power Pivot to analyze data, create advanced reports & prepare dashboards all from familiar interface of Excel. This is ideal for data analysts, reporting & MIS professionals, business analysts, managers & dashboard makers.