Excel Tables Tutorial & 13 Tips for making you a Data Guru
Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.
What is an excel table?
Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”
60 sports in six charts
On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.
First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.
Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts
We all know that learning a few keyboard shortcuts can speedup your Excel game. Most pro users rely on a handful shortcuts when working with large spreadsheets. But when it comes to charting, we automatically reach for mouse. But do you know that you can use few simple shortcuts to do most day to day chart related things?
Ready for top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel charts? Read on.
5 conditional formatting top tips – Excel basics
Time for another round of unconditional love. Today, let’s learn about conditional formatting top tips. It is one of the most useful and powerful features in Excel. With just a few clicks of conditional formatting you can add powerful insights to your data. Ready to learn the top tips? Read on.
18 ways to turn analysis projects into a nightmare
Every week, we read news about failed analysis projects. If you listen carefully, you can hear the grunts, screams and curses of thousands of analysts all over the world about their analysis nightmares.
At Chandoo.org, we talk a lot about best practices for data analytics. So today, let’s peek in to the dark side and understand the mistakes that can turn your analysis project into a nightmare.
There are 3 parts in any analysis project
To understand these worst practices in analysis world, first let’s break analysis projects in to 3 parts.
- Requirements
- Data Structure
- Tools & Construction
Let’s deep dive in to each area of the analysis projects to see what can go wrong.
Visualizing Financial Metrics – 30 Alternatives
Around 2 months back, I asked you to visualize multiple variable data for 4 companies using Excel. 30 of you responded to the challenge with several interesting and awesome charts, dashboards and reports to visualize the financial metric data. Today, let’s take a look at the contest entries and learn from them.
First a quick note:
I am really sorry for the delay in compiling the results for this contest. Originally I planned to announce them during last week of July. But my move to New Zealand disrupted the workflow. I know the contestants have poured in a lot of time & effort in creating these fabulous workbook and it is unfair on my part. I am sorry and I will manage future contests better.
CP054: Top 10 Pivot Table Tricks for YOU
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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In the 54th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s make you awesome in Pivot Tables.
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- Quick updates
- Top 10 pivot table tricks
- Adding same value field twice
- Tabular layouts
- GETPIVOTDATA & 2 bonus tricks
- Relationships & data model
- One slicer to rule them all
- Show only top x values
- Relative performance
- Show unique count
- Spruce up with conditional formats
- Not so ugly pivot charts
- Resources & Show notes for you