10 Tips to Make Better and Boss-proof Excel Spreadsheets
We all have atleast one story of how that one time the boss / co-worker / classmate / cat ruined the carefully crafted excel spreadsheet by mucking up the formulas or disturbing the formatting. Read this post to learn 10 awesome excel tips to make better and boss-proof excel sheets.
Switch Rows and Columns in Charts [Quick Charting Tip]
Let us say you have built a nice chart showing your sales and profits for the top 5 products (learn how to highlight top 5 products in a list), with products on X axis. Suddenly your boss wants to switch the rows to columns (or transpose the chart) so that she can see metric level grouping instead of product level grouping. No need to freak out and rush to Espresso machine, You can do it very easily with Excel Charting features.
In today’s quick tip you will learn how to swap chart rows and columns in excel.
Copy Data Validations from one cell to another [quick tip]
If only there is paste special for everything in life, things would be much more smoother and fun. Alas, the paste special is limited only to excel.
Here is a handy trick you can use to quickly scale up data validations set up in one cell to say a range of cells.
Just copy the cell by pressing CTRL+C and then go to the target cell(s) and press ALT+ESN. And your data validations are pasted in the new cells. That is all. Quick and Easy.
Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!
Check out an implementation of project dashboard along with tweetboard by our reader Fernando. He says, it “turned out to be a great success”. I am so happy for him.
Btw, the post includes a link to download the workbook so that you can see the dashboard and tweetboard in action.
Prevent Duplicate Data Entry using Cell Validations
We all know that data validation is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use data validation to create a drop-down list in a cell and limit the values user can enter. But, do you know that you can use data validation in a multitude of ways to prevent users from entering wrong data?
Here is a practical application: Prevent users from entering duplicate values in a range of cells.
For eg. you are making an invoice. Wouldn’t it be cool if Excel prompted you when you enter a duplicate line item so that increase the item quantity instead of repeating it.
Solve Sudoku Puzzles using Excel [because it is weekend]
Sanjay, my colleague is an avid programmer and excel enthusiast. In his spare time he wrote a small VBA macro to solve Sudoku. Sudoku is a very famous number based puzzle with a 9×9 grid of cells. Each of the 9 rows, columns and 3×3 blocks should be filled in such a way that they have all the numbers from 1 to 9. Sudoku is a very effective way to keep your brain cells ticking. I am a huge sudoku fan and I solve sudoku whenever I have few minutes to kill. So naturally I jumped with joy when I saw Sanjay’s excel macro for solving sudoku. He is kind enough to let me share this with all of you.
The Project Management Bundle for Excel is Here, Download your copy today
I have a super exciting news for all our members. During the last several weeks, I have been working on making 24 strikingly remarkable and easy to use excel templates for better project management. Finally the bundle is ready. You can get a copy of the bundle starting today.