All articles with 'microsoft' Tag

My Friend and long time Microsoft Excel MVP, Jon Peltier has released a wonderful little excel charting utility called Cluster Stack Chart Utility. Out of curiosity I have mailed Jon and asked him if he could send me a copy of it so that I can review the product and recommend it to PHD reader community. He is kind enough to mail the add-in to me and here goes my review of the tool.

Learn how you can write your own twitter client using Excel. All it takes is excel, internet connection and 5 minutes of spare time.

A simple label formatting hack can improve the effectiveness of YoY change charts by adding color to differentiate positive vs. negative growth (or mediocre vs. sky rocketing growth rates). See this example:

Hurray, PHD blog crossed 2000 RSS Subscriber base. This is a very significant milestone for me.

To celebrate this occasion we have a mega post: 100 Excel & Charting Tips, Tricks and Resources for you.

Microsoft excel bubble chart based Visualization to understand how various travel sites compete search terms

9 charting tricks you can use to make your pie charts likable

Often when you use excel to track a particular item (like expenses, exercise schedules, investments) you usually enter the current date (and time). This is nothing but timestamping. Once the item is time stamped, it is much more easier to analyze it. Here is an excel formula trick to generate timestamps.

A combination chart is when you combine two different charts to make one. A popular example for combination chart is a line & bar graph combination.

I have received 2009 Microsoft MVP Award.

The award is presented for Excel community contributions made in the past and includes a complimentary subscription to MSDN (and or Technet). It is a great feeling to know about this.

I am very thankful to this site and all the things I could learn and share through it. Special thanks to the anonymous MVP for nominating my name.

Here is a very quick spreadcheat for the new year.

If you need to select all the cells in a series (either row-wise or or in columns) you can use one of these 2 shortcuts (and avoid unnecessary scrolling)

1. Select the first cell in the series

2. Press Shift + Ctrl + Down arrow

Or

1. Select the first cell in the series

2. Hold down SHIFT and Double click on the edge of cell in the direction you want to select

After a really long wait finally I have used … Excel 2007 (drum roll) and contrary to what many people think, I have found Excel 2007 to be a very well designed piece of software. Of course there are various issues with it and I am sure folks at MS are working on them so that next versions of MS Office are much more pleasant and simpler to use.

I wanted to share 10 wow factors in Excel 2007 that may convince you to try it.

It is the holiday week, that means less posts and more fun. We went to a friend’s wedding yesterday and had wonderful time. We are planning to celebrate Christmas at home with friends this year. How are you celebrating the holidays this year?

A very quick spreadcheat for Friday. If you need to type content in a cell and you want to see it multiple lines then use alt + enter to break the content in several lines. See to the right for an example.

Bonus tip: If you are using formulas to create content in a cell by combining various text values and you want to introduce line breaks at certain points … For eg. you are creating an address field by combining house number, street name, city and zip code and you want to introduce line breaks after house number and street name then you can use CHAR(10).

Amit at Digital Inspiration features a lengthy way of creating beautiful excel cell art from an image. I guess we all can use a method that is little simpler and smarter.

PHD reader and commenter Vishy contributed this post through e-mail. Thank you so much Vishy for this very useful tip. The Problem: You have created a specific view of your data in Excel (say by filtering, zooming out, changing column width, hiding specific rows, customizing window settings, print settings etc.). This is your reference point […]