Unleash the pattern power with Excel Fill [quick tip]
When you are a “work from home” dad, you can see a lot of patterns. Here is one.
My kids come home from school by noon (they are too young for full day school). Right after lunch they watch their favorite cartoon program, Team Umizoomi, in which few fictional characters go about solving problems in the Umi city using maths. Milli, one of the characters is an expert with patterns. She solves problems by identifying patterns and unleashing pattern power.
Team Umizoomi & Excel Fill – How do they link up?
Here is how they link up.
Imagine you have a workbook where you need to follow a pattern, like above.
You too can unleash the pattern power. What more… you needn’t break in to a song sequence every-time you unleash the power.
Write faster formulas with Auto-correct
Want to write formulas faster? Here is a quick tip.
Use Auto-correct!
That is right. Excel’s auto-correct feature can be setup to help you write formulas faster. See above demo. Read on for details.
Open & Save files faster in Excel 2013 [quick tip]
Excel 2013, the newest version of Excel as of writing this has many great features like data modeling, improved pivot tables, power view, flash fill etc. But one thing that I find very annoying is the Open & Save experience. Any time we open a file or save a workbook (which happens alot everyday), we must navigate the painful backstage screen to select our favorite folders. You see, Excel 2013 supports cloud saving. So that means, by default it will show your Office 365 or OneDrive or SkyDrive or whatever fancy new name Microsoft has for these things. But I am not so much in to clouding. Heck, I see a passing cloud in the sky and I almost run inside my house. So what to do?
Simple. We can turn off these features.
Drag to multi-select slicer items [quick tip]
Hola folks…
My trip to Houston & Dallas was very successful, fun & awesome. I got back home on Friday and instantly I am in another fun, awesome & happy place with my kids, Jo (my wife), rest of the family & friends.
Today, I want to share a very simple yet super awesome trick with you. I learned this from Augie, one of the Houston Masterclass participants.
You can drag slicer items to multi-select them.
Selecting multiple items in a slicer quickly
We know that slicers are powerful, friendly and fun way to filter the pivot tables, pivot charts, power pivot tables and regular tables (only in 2013). They are visual filters that can be used to instantly filter the data (or report). But when it comes to selecting multiple items, slicers can be hard. We must hold CTRL key and tap multiple slicer items one at a time to select them. At least that is how I used to do it.
Do you know we can drag to multi-select?
See this demo:
Thank you, Houston meetup & Bonus tip
My mom will be very unhappy with this post. She always told me to focus on one thing at a time. But in this post we are talking about 3 things, not one. Sorry mom.
1. Thank you
I want to thank you for visiting chandoo.org & supporting us.
As I am about to leave to USA for attending Excelapalooza conference, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how much you have given me & my family. Almost 4.5 years ago, when I left my plush corporate job to work full time on Chandoo.org, I had no clue how the future will unfold. Today my heart is full of happiness, my family is secure, my site has grown by heaps and our community (especially you) is awesome.
Without your enthusiasm to learn and keen desire to become awesome, I would not have a job (of running this website). You inspire me to learn new things everyday so that I can share them with you.
Thank you for all the visits, clicks, comments, emails, tweets, likes, signups, purchases & love.
Thank you.
Quickly convert numbers stored as text [tip]
Here is a quick tip to start the week.
Often, we end up with a situation where a bunch of numbers are stored as text.
In such cases, Excel displays a warning indicator at the top-left corner of the cell. If you click on warning symbol next to the cell, Excel shows a menu offering choices to treat the error.
Convert fractional Excel time to hours & minutes [Quick tip]
Time for another quick Excel tip.
Lets say the park near your house rents tennis courts by hour. And they charge $10 per hour. At the end of an intense tennis playing week, Linda, the tennis court manager called you up and said you need to pay $78 as rent for that week.
How many hours did you play?
Of course 78/10 = 7.8 hours.
But we all know that 7.8 hours makes no sense.
We also know that 7.8 hours is really 7 hours 48 minutes.
So how to convert 7.8 hrs to 7:48 ?