All articles with 'MS' Tag

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Dashboards let users get all the information they want in a quick glance. Not if users start using scroll bars and scroll down to cell A64000. So here is a quick and dirty trick. Assuming your dashboard ends in row 40, select row 41 and go to menu > window > freeze panes. That way […]

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.