All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

Often when you need to generate a sample from large data set, you may want to pick data from a random date. In such cases, you can use excel’s RAND() and RANDBETWEEN() formulas to pick a random date. Here I have included few examples,

Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.

The workbook is full of lessons on conditional formatting, cell formatting, using formulas. Go ahead and download it today.

Dilbert is my favorite cartoon (Calvin & Hobbes comes second). I like it so much that I have named this blog after Dilbert. So, today, as as ode to Dilbert and all things excel, we present you… Dilbert on Excel. Read the rest of this post to find some great dilbert strips on excel modeling, formulas, errors and annoyances. Have a fun weekend.

One of the annoyances of charts is that they all look like boxes (except for pie charts, they just look wrong). Boxes might be ok when you are making 1 or 2 charts. But a whole dashboard of boxes can look little rigid. So how can we make the charts peppy without loosing any effect? Like these charts below:

Very simple, we use drawing shapes in MS Excel to draw whatever we want and overlay the chart on top.

Charley at Excel User is running a sale on the excel dashboard kits. It is too good to be true. You get the plug and play dashboard kits for half the regular price. Go here to avail this offer and read on, if you are not sure what the dashboard kit is.

For a long time now, I have been an advocate of Excel User’s dashboards. Charley is a pioneer when it comes to excel based dashboard reporting. He has popularized several techniques like using sumproduct formula, using camera tool etc. I have been such a fan boy of his work that I even interviewed him once on this blog.

Jon Peltier can stand on his roof and shout in to a megaphone “Use Bar Charts, Not Pies”, but the fact remains that most of us use pie charts sometime or other. In fact I will go ahead and say that pie charts are actually the most widely used charts in business contexts.

Today I want to teach you a simple pie chart hack that can improve readability of the chart while retaining most of the critical information intact.

Recently I have conducted a survey on my blog to find out your pulse on PHD. Quite a few survey respondents have told me that PHD needs a topic-wise archive so that you can learn excel easily. So over the weekend I have prepared a webpage where you can find topic-wise posts on excel and […]

Most of us use chart formatting options to change the way grid-lines, data series, labels, axis, titles, plot areas look. Chart formatting is one of the areas where people spend most time. Today I want to teach you a quick productivity hack to speed up chart formatting. In excel 2007 and above, when you click […]

It is very usual for retailers to offer huge discounts and offers during thanksgiving, to celebrate the onset of Christmas shopping season. In that spirit, I am announcing PHD thanksgiving sale. The sale is open from now to 26th December, 2009.

If you have already purchased something from me in the last 30 days (that is since 25th October, 2009): You are still eligible for these deals. Just reply to the “purchase confirmation” e-mail I sent you when you bought the stuff and I will give you the offer…

Every year, on 4th Thursday of November, folks in US celebrate Thanksgiving day. A similar holiday exists in Canada too, they celebrate it on Second Monday of Every October.We will celebrate thanksgiving in PHD style, by sharing a wacky formula tip.

Today, we are going to learn how to use excel formulas to find out thanksgiving day’s date for any year.

At PHD household, we believe in using money wisely. Both Mrs. PHD and I come from very modest backgrounds. Our upbringing has taught us value of money in the most effective way – by exposing us to not having any. So when we got our first job (did I tell you that both Jo and I started working in same company and sat in same floor? Oh, it was such a lovely time), we were very prudent and decided not to waste money on anything trivial (we still are, just that over last 6 years our earning capacity increased a bit and we became parents).

Anyways, I am not here to bore you about my household. But I am here to tell you fun ways to track expenses and household budgets using spreadsheets.

Today I want to introduce Excel 2010 to you. Excel 2010 is the latest version of spreadsheet software from Microsoft, set to be released for sale in late 2010. On Nov 18th, MS released the public beta of Excel 2010 [download here] along with other Office productivity software.

Excel 2010 has several improvements compared to earlier version – Excel 2007. In this post, I want to highlight some of the User Interface improvements made in Excel 2010 that are very exciting and fun to use.

As of yesterday, the project management templates have crossed 100 customer milestone. That is right my friend, one hundred project managers have chosen to manage their projects better using our templates. I have asked our customers to share their feedback and this is what they say: I think that the templates are excellent. A million […]

Here is a simple yet novel use of formulas. Let us say you have a list of values in range A1:A5 and you want to reverse the list. In an empty cell write =INDEX($A$1:$A$5,6-ROWS($A$1:A1)) and copy down. Boom, you get the reversed list. Here is how the formula works: In the reversed list, first item […]

Finally the public beta of Office 2010 is out. Go to Office Beta site and download the installation today. Make sure you select the “custom” installation option and choose to “keep the old versions”, otherwise the beta will upgrade your office installation. (Beta installation expires by October 2010) Here is a brief list of new […]