All articles with 'microsoft' Tag

Stružák, one of the commenters on the 2009 Excel Calendar Template post asked me if I can rearrange the cells in the calendar so that the week could start on Monday. Since I didn’t have access to internet for a while, I have asked him to make the necessary changes and mail it to me […]

Can you imagine building a complex worksheet without formulas? I can’t. While no one can dispute the usability of formulas, we all know how painful it is when an excel formula returns a mysterious error and we don’t know what is causing the error.

Finally I have got internet connection at home. The folks at Airtel Broadband are very fast and professional. They set up the connection in very few days. So I will be able to blog regularly from now on.

Moving to this week’s excel links you should browse;

Grid lines provide great help in understanding values in a chart. Here is a handy trick you can use in the next bar chart to spice it up. Here is how you can get this type of chart (we will call it a brick chart) First we will make a regular bar chart Now, let […]

Free excel calendar template for year 2009 (well, it works for any year all the way up to 9999)

Go ahead and download it, change the year number in the first sheet to 1981 or something and see the magic.

Camera tool is your way of creating visual reference in an excel sheet. It is one of the useful and hidden features of excel. Here is how it works. You specify a rectangular area in your workbook and camera tool creates a mirror image of that area as a drawing object. You can move it or resize it. And whenever the contents of original rectangular area changes (charts, drawings or cell values) the mirror image changes too.

Every Monday PHD shares some of the best excel related articles around the web so that you are up to date with discussions and new ways to be productive. Here is a list of links recommended for this week.

Tomorrow is thanksgiving day here. It is a harvest festival on which people express thanks for what they have. Much like Sankranthi (pongal) in India. At this moment I am very angry and frustrated about the terror strikes in Mumbai. I am not sure how a person can do something like this to others. I […]

Data validation is a great way to keep your users informed about possible values in a cell and guide them to select something appropriate. As part of the spreadcheats series, in this post we will discuss 2 advanced data validation techniques that can help you when you are modeling a complex worksheet.

One of the most common comments we get here is “how does xxx formula works?” Even though there is vast documentation on excel formulas including the built-in help in MS Office, often it is difficult for us to learn a formula quickly and use it in a snap. So to help new users of excel […]

Often when you are writing code or testing an application, it might be helpful to have random phone numbers generated for you. Here is an excel formula that I use: =value(left(substitute(rand(),”0.”,””),10)) try these 2 instead (thanks to John) =RAND()*(9999999999-1000000000)+1000000000 =RANDBETWEEN(1000000000,9999999999) [needs analysis toolpack add-in or excel 2007] Even though it works most of the time […]

Reader Joann asks through email: Take the number 117490. I need to break it down5 times: 11749 1174 117 11 1 You can use FLOOR() function to get the desired result, like this: =FLOOR(your-number/10^digit-no,1) See the image below:

When I read Is your website’s underwear showing?, I couldn’t control the urge to write this one. So the big screaming friday question everyone… Is your chart’s underwear showing? What is my chart’s underwear? you may ask. My dear reader, it is the background color (that grayish shade excel adds by default). Also commonly known […]

Most of us are comfortable with numbers, but we are confused when it comes to convert the numbers to charts. We struggle finding the right size, color and type of charts for our numbers. The challenge is two fold, we want to make the charts look good (we mean, really… really good) but at the […]

If for every countif() I write excel paid me a dollar, I would be a millionaire by now. It is such a versatile and fun formula to work with that I have decided to write about it as third post in our spreadcheats series. Using COUNTIF() to replace pivot tables: We all know that you […]