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All articles with 'microsoft' Tag

29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]

Published on Aug 24, 2009 in Excel Howtos, Featured, Learn Excel

It is no exaggeration that knowing excel formulas can give you a career boost. From someone starting at the long list of numbers, you can suddenly become a data god who can lookup, manipulate and analyze any spreadsheet.

So when our little excel blog hit the 5000 RSS Subscriber milestone, I celebrated the occasion by asking you to share an excel formula through twitter or comments with rest of us. And boy, what an excellent list of formula tips you have shared with us all.
Here is the complete list of entries for the twitter formula contest.

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50 Best Cities for Finding a Job [Incell Dashboard using Excel]

Published on Aug 20, 2009 in Charts and Graphs, Learn Excel
50 Best Cities for Finding a Job [Incell Dashboard using Excel]

We all know that incell charts are a very cool way to explore and visualize data. Personally I like them so much that I have written several tutorials on it here. Today we will see how a Job dashboard on “50 best cities for finding a job” originally prepared by Indeed job search engine can be recreated in Excel using In-cell charts. The final outcome is something like this.

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Hide Grid Lines [Quick Tip]

Published on Aug 13, 2009 in Excel Howtos
Hide Grid Lines [Quick Tip]

I like to hide grid lines on my spreadsheets and charts whenever possible. I think removing gridlines makes the charts and worksheets more presentable. In case you are wondering how to remove (or hide) gridlines from your worksheet or chart, follow these simple instructions.

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Waterfall Charts using Excel

Published on Aug 10, 2009 in Charts and Graphs, Featured
Waterfall Charts using Excel

Learn how to create waterfall charts in Excel in this tutorial. Our guest author, Aaron, explains how to create cool looking waterfall charts with connectors. Waterfall charts are great, especially for visually showing the contribution of parts to a whole.

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Excel Time Sheets and Resource Management [Project Management using Excel – Part 4 of 6]

Published on Aug 5, 2009 in Charts and Graphs, Featured, Learn Excel
Excel Time Sheets and Resource Management [Project Management using Excel – Part 4 of 6]

Timesheets are like TPS reports of any project. Team members think of them as an annoying activity. For managers, timesheets are a vital component to understand how team is working and where the effort is going. By using Microsoft Excel capabilities you can create a truly remarkable timesheet tracking tool.

In this installment of project management using excel series, we will learn 3 things about timesheets and resource management using Excel
1. How to setup a simple timesheet template in excel?
2. How to make a more robust timesheet tracker tool in Excel?
3. How to use the timesheet data to make a resource loading chart?

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Time to showoff your VBA skills – Help me fix ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert snafu

Published on Jul 30, 2009 in VBA Macros
Time to showoff your VBA skills – Help me fix ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert snafu

I am stuck with an excel problem and I need your help. While trying to insert an image in to my excel 2007 workbook using VBA I hit on this weird error and not able to use the ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert method. Do you know why?

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Build a Retirement Calculator using Excel (learn how to use Goal Seek as a bonus)

Published on Jul 29, 2009 in Excel Howtos, Featured, Learn Excel, personal finance
Build a Retirement Calculator using Excel (learn how to use Goal Seek as a bonus)

In this installment of spreadcheats, we will learn how to use goal seek feature of excel. We will build a retirement savings calculator using excel. We will learn to use Excel’s FV() formula to estimate the corpus that can be accumulated by saving fixed amount every month.

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Sumif with multiple conditions [quick tip]

Published on Jul 22, 2009 in Excel Howtos
Sumif with multiple conditions [quick tip]

Here is a little formula trick if you need to sum a range of cells based on multiple conditions.

Assuming you have the starfleet, captain and flight data, you can use the good old sum() in an array formula to conditionally sum values meeting multiple criteria. Read on to learn this quick tip.

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Generating invoice numbers using excel [reader questions]

Published on Jul 20, 2009 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
Generating invoice numbers using excel [reader questions]

Learn how to generate invoice numbers, tax codes etc. using Microsoft Excel. In this example we will take a real life example shared by Michelle and findout how we can generate invoice numbers using excel formulas. Read more to learn and download the example workbook.

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Formula 1 Style Sorting of Times (Durations) in Excel

Published on Jul 15, 2009 in Excel Howtos
Formula 1 Style Sorting of Times (Durations) in Excel

The other day I was watching Formula 1 on TV. I think it is the ideal game to follow for a lazy dude like me. It is on every other weekend. It takes .32 seconds to understand the game and 3.2 seconds to know the points and scoring mechanism. But I am not here to convince you to follow the game. While looking at score boards, it struck me,

“how about writing excel formulas for sorting a list of durations (or numbers) in the formula 1 order?”

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14 Basic Skills for Chart Makers (Big question: How many do you have?)

Blame John Walkenbach if you don’t like this post. There, I said it. He started the 14 basic skills for men. And then added 14 basic skills for women. Not stopping there, he went ahead and added 14 basic skills for dogs. Debra at Contextures blog added her 14 cents by writing 14 basic skills for excel users.

I got jittery and quickly searched 14 basic skills for people writing 14 basic skills posts on google. Alas! nothing found. But being the inveterate non-give-upper I went ahead and prepared my list.

<drum roll> here is the,
14 basic skills for people making charts (or graphs or plots or ok, you get the point)

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Make an Impressive Product Catalog [spreadsheets for small business]

Published on Jul 13, 2009 in excel apps, Learn Excel
Make an Impressive Product Catalog [spreadsheets for small business]

It is the customer on the phone again, she wants to know what products we have.
How cool would it be if we can send her a spreadsheet with all the products neatly listed in a table and she can use filters to find what she likes. Alas, we end up sending a biggish PDF brochure that is both difficult to make and maintain.

Well, not any more.

Today we will learn a very useful and fun trick in Excel. We will create a product catalog using Excel that you can send to your clients or boss (and impress them).

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Project Management: Show Milestones in a Timeline [Part 3 of 6]

Published on Jul 9, 2009 in Charts and Graphs, Featured, Learn Excel
Project Management: Show Milestones in a Timeline [Part 3 of 6]

Learn how to create a timeline chart in excel to display the progress of your project. Timelines are a good way to communicate about the project status to new team members and stake holders. Also, download the excel timeline chart template and make your own timeline charts.

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How to Round and Sort Data using Excel Formulas?

Published on Jul 6, 2009 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
How to Round and Sort Data using Excel Formulas?

Cheryl asks via e-mail, “I was wondering if you could help me figure out how to combine the round formula with the rank formula? I need to first round all the numbers and then rank them.”

Of course we can solve this by simply using array formulas. Curious? Find out more by reading the rest of this post.

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Create a Combination Chart, Add Secondary Axis in Excel [15 Second Tutorial]

Published on Jul 2, 2009 in Charts and Graphs, Excel Howtos

Two most commonly asked or searched queries when it comes to charting are,

  • How to combine two chart types in one chart, like a line chart combined with bar chart?
  • How to add a secondary axis to the chart so that one or more data series are plotted on the secondary axis?

Watch this video tutorial to learn how to do both in less than 15 seconds.

Watch it on youtube: Creating combination charts and adding secondary axis – video tutorial

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