All articles with 'personal' Tag

We wish you a merry Christmas & very happy New Year 2013. May your holidays be filled with joy and warmth. And your new year with lots of hope, fun, strength and awesomeness.

I also want to tell you how thankful & fortunate I feel to have your support in this year. Your desire to learn Excel & become awesome at your work motivates me everyday to learn & share. 2012 is a memorable year because of you. Thank you.

Ever seen a glaring, over the top, wow-I-am-sooo-cool type of spreadsheet? Lets call them Gangnam spreadsheets!

Gangnam what?!?

If you have never heard about Gangnam style, do not worry. Just like you I too was living under a rock for about a week ago. Then I watched the awesome Gangnam style song. And now I am hooked. You can see it here.

What has all this got to do with Excel?
Oh I am coming to the point. One of the key ingredients of being awesome in Excel is,

To make our Excel workbooks communicate best by avoiding over the top formatting, unnecessary bells & whistles and focusing on what our users want.

But Excel being a feature rich software, it does have various so called Gangnam styles – superfluous 3d effects, formatting options, charting choices and as such.

Today, lets talk Excel formatting – Gangnam style

Today is my kids’ (we have twins – boy & girl) 3rd birthday. As we celebrate the day, I want to take a moment away from all Excel stuff and share my experience being a dad. Grab a cup of coffee or whatever keeps you going, relax and read on.

As the gentleman at immigration counter stamped my passport & said, “Welcome to Australia”, I could barely contain my excitement. You see, Australia has been on my list of places to visit as far back as I can remember. It finally happened on On Sunday, 29th of April 2012.

After collecting my baggage, I walked out of Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport. My friend Danielle (from Plum Solutions) is waiting for me there. Thus began my Australian adventure and it was fantastic. (Aussies so fondly use this word).

Grab a fine cup of coffee, sit back and read to know how the whole experience went.

Do you want to catchup with Chandoo (and Hui) for a Sundowner in Perth ?
Read here for details.

Two years ago, If someone told me I would be flying to Australia & get handsomely paid to do it, I would have rubbished the thought. You see, exactly two years ago, I quit my job to work on Chandoo.org for full time.

My main focuses then were,

1) to make sure my family would not starve or be deprived.
2) to make you awesome in Excel

Today, #1 does not keep me up in the night. Thanks to you. You have supported Chandoo.org, purchased our products, spread good word about our site. This removed all my doubts & financial worries. Now, most of my work day is focused on making you awesome in Excel.

When I announced my upcoming Australian Excel masterclass, I got quite a few mails (ok, just a few), all which are on these lines,

Wow, I would love to meet you when you are here. Let me know if you have sometime on an evening for some coffee or beer?

Down under, I must be popular.

After saying yes to a few invitations, I saw the hassle in arranging several individual rendezvous. So here is an open invitation to you all. If you like Chandoo.org or Australian brewed coffee, clear your calender on below dates,

• Sydney – 30th April
• Brisbane – 2nd June

I am yet to decide the venue & time. But preferably, we will meet near water around 5ish in the evening. If you want to join me & share your Excel stories (or just any stories), fill up below form.

Hello Friends…,

Happy Easter 2012

It is Easter time again. It has been our tradition to hide some Easter eggs so that you have fun discovering them. I usually hide the eggs in the blog post. But this year, I went one more step and created an Excel file with 3 hidden Easter eggs.

Go ahead and find the eggs. I am sure you will love them 🙂

Today, I am taking a break from Speedy Spreadsheet Week to celebrate Telugu New year with my family. Ugadi (meaning start of a new era) is celebrated on first day of Telugu year and occurs in March / April.

Here is a pic from early today morning, when we could finally convince the kids to laugh when the camera clicks.

It has been a while since we had an Excel Links feature. So here we go again. But before jumping in to all the Excel goodness, let me share a few tidbits about our Bangkok adventure.

2011 has been the most awesome year since we started Chandoo.org.

Without doubt, the credit goes to our community – that is you.

I feel very fortunate to have you in our community. You inspire me to learn & share. I know I said this several times, but everytime, I feel like I have not done enough. Thank you so very much.

Apart from our little community, I feel thankful to many others, who have helped me through out 2011 to make you awesome in Excel. In this post, I am highlighting them & expressing my gratitude.

Christmas & New year have always been our favorite holidays. Many of our relatives & friends visit us around this time. The weather is excellent. This year, it seems even more special. Nakshatra & Nishanth (our twins) are looking forward to this as much as we do. Plus, we are celebrating it in our new home. Feels magical.

We wish you Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2012.

I also want to tell you how thankful I am for your love, support & kindness. Everyday, I feel inspired knowing that I can share my knowledge, mistakes & passion with all of you. Thank you so much for your eagerness to learn from me, we have a home now, we get to spend time with our kids and do things we love & care. Thank you.

I have a happy news to share. Recently, we moved in to our new home.

As we live, breathe, enjoy and sleep in this home, I could not thank enough for your support in making this happen. I am so glad you identify with the mission of Chandoo.org and spread a good word about it. I am so humbled that you support us by joining our training programs, purchasing our e-books & products. I am so thankful to you for spending time with us everyday, learning & sharing new things.

Thank you.

I am also thankful to MS Excel, the powerful, awesome tool that transformed my life. It gave me the courage to quit a comfortable job and embark on an exciting journey of running a small business. Thank you so much Microsoft & Excel for being awesome.

Read this to find out the back story and see the pics of our home.

Did you know that MS Excel has a hidden, life altering Easter egg? This is a story of how I found it and discovered joy. Read on.

Almost an year ago, I have quit my job with one of the leading IT companies in the world, to embark on an uncertain but very exciting journey. I have started my own business around MS Excel – creating & selling awesome Excel products & training programs.

This is a continuation of the Chandoo.org Start-up Story posted around the same time last year. Grab a cup of coffee and read it in leisure. Do not expect any Excel tips. 🙂

Many of you have emailed and asked me, “Chandoo, can you help us learn VBA too? Just like you do with Excel.”

Well, as flattering as those requests were, the fact is, I was lousy at VBA. Well, I used to be very good at Visual Basic, back in the college days. But my programming skills have rusted over the years as I did very little coding. I guess, I have become a business-guy. So it took me time to re-learn VBA. And now, I am happy to announce that We are ready to start our very first batch of VBA Class.

But, before we start, I need some help from you. I want to know what is it that you want to learn, so that we can design the course curriculum & methodology around your needs.

So please take a few minutes and complete this survey:

click here to the survey.