Want to Feed RSS to your Excel Sheet? Read this!
RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs. If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like: Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites […]
Shuffle a list of numbers / items in excel spreadsheet
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 […]
Extract URLs from an excel spreadsheet cell using UDFs
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 […]
Get Stock Quotes in Excel
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, […]
Quickly display unique items in an excel list using advanced filters
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: […]
Improve productivity by opening same excel sheet in 2 windows – quick tip
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 […]
How to add a range of cells in excel – concat()
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 […]