All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

Often when we are making spreadsheets for forecasting or planning we would like to keep the starting month dynamic so that rest of the months in the plan can automatically rolled. Don’t understand? See this example: This type of setup is quite useful as it lets us change the starting month very easily. We can […]

It is Easter Time again. Although I am not in Scandinavia (where Easter is a big thing) any more, we have a rather biggish family gathering here at PHD household during this weekend. We are also having anna prashanam for the little ones. It is the ceremony we do in India when kids eat rice […]

A panel chart (often called as trellis display or small-multiples) shows data for multiple variables in an easy to digest format. It lets users compare in any way and draw conclusions with ease.

Today, I want to discuss how the principles of panel chart can be applied to visualize a complex set of survey results. For this we will use the recent survey conducted by Gartner on how various customers use BI (Business Intelligence) tools.

Francis J Hayes runs probably one of the most popular excel news letters. His email newsletter, called as “The Excel Addict” has an interesting nugget, tip or trick every week. I have been reading his emails for the last few months and I really enjoy them. So naturally I got curious when I heard about Francis’ e-book titled “101 Secrets of a Microsoft Excel Addict“. Yesterday I purchased a copy of the book and there are so many hidden gems in the book that I had to tell you about it.

In part 2 of Excel Dynamic Dashboard Tutorial, we will learn how to set up various dynamic charts that are part of the dashboard. We start with a simple dynamic pie chart that shows the sales distributions and then move on to sales trend line charts. These charts use various excel formulas to pull in the information based on user selection.

Let us start the week with a simple formula (well, to be fair, let us start the week with a strong cup of coffee, then this formula).

Often when we have large data sets, we apply data filters to select and display only information we want to see.

Some of you know that whenever we apply filters on a dataset, we can look at status bar area to find out if any filter is applied on the current worksheet.

But, what if you need a way to show “filtering” status thru formulas? Like this…,

It is Friday again, time for another poll on PHD. This time, we will keep it very simple. I want to know what you use excel for? I use excel for, Preparing dashboards, reports, automation solutions for my clients Making invoices, estimates, plans for my projects Tracking various project activities (bugs, issues, changes, requirements etc.) […]

Just weeks before Christmas, Ross McLean, who runs Methods in Excel (a very cool and useful Excel blog) asked me if I can join him for a small podcast interview on things we both love – excel, charts and talking. I couldn’t be more happier to accept his offer. We did the podcast and life kept busy both of us for a while. That is until yesterday, when Ross made the podcast available online for all of us.

Please go here to listen to my first podcast interview.

This is continuation of our earlier post Exploring Pivot Table P&L Reports.

We have learned how to change our P&L report on various data elements. We have seen how the P&L report can be changed with just few clicks.

In this post we will be learning some grouping tricks in PivotTables. We will cover grouping of dates, text fields and numeric fields. You will need to start with Monthly P&L report prepared in previous post. We will also learn some really clever tricks and hacks on how to group data in Pivot Tables. So read on…,

Sometimes when we import data from another source in to excel, the dates are not imported properly. This can be due to any number of reasons. In this post, we will learn some tricks and ideas you can use to quickly convert text to dates.

Sparkline or Microchart is a tiny little chart that you can place on dashboards, reports or presentations to provide rich visualization without loosing much space. In excel 2010, MS introduced a beautiful feature for creating sparklines from data in spreadsheets. For earlier versions of Excel (that is 2007 and before) there is no native support […]

Here is a very quick, very short excel tip. Add the “select objects” tool to Quick Access Toolbar. In excel 2003 and earlier, this button is available in the bottom left corner (on the drawing toolbar) so that whenever you are working with charts or drawing shapes, you could easily select multiple objects and drag, […]

In this and next 3 posts, we will learn how to make a Dynamic Dashboard using Microsoft Excel.

At the end of this tutorial, you will learn how easy it is to set up a dynamic dashboard using excel formulas and simple VBA macros.

As some of you know almost 10 days back I left Denmark and came back to India. I had to come back because of visa and personal issues. For the next 6 months PHDs will be based out of India and working from home. While this gives me a lot more time, I will be […]

In October 2008, I have started an ambitious series of posts on this blog called – Spreadcheats. These are little tricks, nuggets, tutorials on using Excel that would make anyone a spreadsheet guru.

The spreadcheats series has been wildly successful. I am compiling all this useful information and articles in to one big post so that anyone can follow the links and become good in Excel. Read on,

[Note: This is not for beginners. If you know what a formula is, you would enjoy this 31 articles]