All articles with 'spreadsheet' Tag

– During formula typing, adjusts the reference type, abs to relative, otherwise repeats last action + – Inserts current date +

Here is a quick Monday tip for data junkies. If you want to shuffle a list of numbers or cells in excel in random order you can do that with “data > sort” menu option of excel. First insert a column next to the list you want to shuffle and enter random numbers in each […]

Often my work involves processing web page data in excel sheets. This includes extracting the hyperlinks from cell contents. There is no formula for extracting hyperlinks though, you can right click on cell and choose “edit hyperlink” to see which address the cell is linking to. But that is a tedious process especially if you […]

I am fascinated by board games. They provide immense fun, anyone can enjoy them, they are unpredictable and best of all they are great value for money. That is why whenever I get sometime I experiment with simulating games to know them better. So, out of curiosity I have created an excel sheet that can generate bingo / housie (housey) tickets – 24 of them at a time. To get new set of tickets you would hit F9 (recalculate).

Reader Nikhil Shah asks in an email: Dear Chandoo, I have some Error In Excel sheet. Problem :- I have a locker number 01234 567890, in Excel it will be displayed as 01234 567890 with the space. However if it was entered as 01234567890, Excel will display it as 1234567890, without the leading zero. If […]

Often we work with large data sheets and it becomes tedious if you want to compare data / formulas etc. You can try split (menu > window > split or alt+w+s) to break the sheet in to two. But there is another cool thing you can do, open a new window for the spreadsheet. Just […]

Here is a ridiculously simple workaround for those of you trying to generate an organization chart in excel: Use google org. chart widget instead 🙂 [If you are reading this in a feedreader this post may not display properly, visit the post page instead.] Open a new google docs spreadsheet (or work on the example […]

Here is a simple to trick to beat the 56 color limitation in excel when you are designing a chart: use picture files (jpg, gif, png etc.) to fill the chart area. You will no longer have to worry about limiting your project report / website / annual report etc. colors to the 56 that […]

How many times you created a chart in Microsoft excel and formatted it for minutes (and sometimes hours) to reduce the eye-sore? Well, I will tell you my answer, its 293049430493 times 😉 Worry not! for you can become a charting superman (or elastigirl) by using these 73 free designer quality chart templates in literally […]

Google docs team has announced gadgets, auto-fill support, formula help while typing and several other goodies yesterday. I was experimenting with these stuff and wanted to share a cool idea with you all. Tracking / Sharing your goals (or resolutions, progress) with everyone using Google Spreadsheet Gadgets: For the example purpose, let us build a […]

F2 – Edit a cell, takes the cursor to the end of the cell F4 – Repeat last action (for eg. if you have inserted a row, repeats that action again) – doent really work with paste through. Ctrl+1 – Open “Format cell dialog” What are your 3 most favorite excel key board shortcuts?

Excel conditional formatting is a hidden and powerful gem that when used well, can change the outlook of your project report / sales budget / project plan or analytical outputs from bunch of raw data in default fonts to something truly professional and good looking. Better still, you dont even need to be a guru […]

The other day I had to make an excel sheet for tracking all errors across one of the applications we are doing for our customer. The format was something like this, We wanted to use a consistent message id format [4 digits: 0001, 0002, … , 1000 etc.]. Now I do not want to type […]

Yesterday while going through my feeds, I have landed on this post about the demographics and use-figures of various social networking (2.0) tools, et al (by businessweek) on think:lab blog. When I looked at the BusinessWeek’s graphical representation of demographics and usage figures of social networks, the first thought that came to me is, “well, […]