All articles with 'how to' Tag

Here is a quick Monday tip for data junkies. If you want to shuffle a list of numbers or cells in excel in random order you can do that with “data > sort” menu option of excel. First insert a column next to the list you want to shuffle and enter random numbers in each […]

Often my work involves processing web page data in excel sheets. This includes extracting the hyperlinks from cell contents. There is no formula for extracting hyperlinks though, you can right click on cell and choose “edit hyperlink” to see which address the cell is linking to. But that is a tedious process especially if you […]

While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything. First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, […]

Imagine you have long list of data and you need to quickly identify which of the items are unique. You can use Advanced Filters to do this. Just select the list of items you want to filter, go to menu > Data > Filter > Advanced filter. You will see a dialog box like this: […]

Often we work with large data sheets and it becomes tedious if you want to compare data / formulas etc. You can try split (menu > window > split or alt+w+s) to break the sheet in to two. But there is another cool thing you can do, open a new window for the spreadsheet. Just […]

Excel concatenate() is seriously crippled, it can add 2 or more strings together, as long as they are supplied as separate parameters. This means, when you have a range of cells with text which you want to add up to create a large text, you need to write an ugly looking biggish concatenate() or use […]

One of the most frequent tasks for any manager is “planning”, be it putting together a hiring schedule or designing a jumbo jet, it all starts with a simple project plan and gantt chart is simple and intuitive representation of the same. But how to make a gantt chart in excel without writing too many […]

Here is a ridiculously easy trick to do nice incell pie charts in excel, what more, they will make you look like a charting wizard. Download free pie chart font from here (direct download link). The font has 21 pie chart codes starting with empty circle (character ‘a’) and ending with full circle (character ‘u’) […]

Here is a simple to trick to beat the 56 color limitation in excel when you are designing a chart: use picture files (jpg, gif, png etc.) to fill the chart area. You will no longer have to worry about limiting your project report / website / annual report etc. colors to the 56 that […]

How many times you created a chart in Microsoft excel and formatted it for minutes (and sometimes hours) to reduce the eye-sore? Well, I will tell you my answer, its 293049430493 times 😉 Worry not! for you can become a charting superman (or elastigirl) by using these 73 free designer quality chart templates in literally […]

Google docs team has announced gadgets, auto-fill support, formula help while typing and several other goodies yesterday. I was experimenting with these stuff and wanted to share a cool idea with you all. Tracking / Sharing your goals (or resolutions, progress) with everyone using Google Spreadsheet Gadgets: For the example purpose, let us build a […]

Excel conditional formatting is a hidden and powerful gem that when used well, can change the outlook of your project report / sales budget / project plan or analytical outputs from bunch of raw data in default fonts to something truly professional and good looking. Better still, you dont even need to be a guru […]

The other day I had to make an excel sheet for tracking all errors across one of the applications we are doing for our customer. The format was something like this, We wanted to use a consistent message id format [4 digits: 0001, 0002, … , 1000 etc.]. Now I do not want to type […]

Yesterday we were calculating our Washington trip expenses and it occurred to me that if there is an excel template where I could enter the trip expenses and who paid what to find out how much we need to pay up / collect, it would be great. I looked around for few seconds, couldn’t find […]

After moving the blog from the blogger to wordpress, my first challenge was to organize the posts for better discovery and search. I have done that by automatically generating tags and tagging posts using a bit of analysis and a bit of insanity. The next challenge was to redirect the traffic from the old blogger […]