All articles with 'spreadsheets' Tag

Today I want to introduce Excel 2010 to you. Excel 2010 is the latest version of spreadsheet software from Microsoft, set to be released for sale in late 2010. On Nov 18th, MS released the public beta of Excel 2010 [download here] along with other Office productivity software.

Excel 2010 has several improvements compared to earlier version – Excel 2007. In this post, I want to highlight some of the User Interface improvements made in Excel 2010 that are very exciting and fun to use.

As of yesterday, the project management templates have crossed 100 customer milestone. That is right my friend, one hundred project managers have chosen to manage their projects better using our templates. I have asked our customers to share their feedback and this is what they say: I think that the templates are excellent. A million […]

Here is a simple yet novel use of formulas. Let us say you have a list of values in range A1:A5 and you want to reverse the list. In an empty cell write =INDEX($A$1:$A$5,6-ROWS($A$1:A1)) and copy down. Boom, you get the reversed list. Here is how the formula works: In the reversed list, first item […]

Transposing rows and columns in a table is one of the most useful tricks when you are pasting data. Yet, it always surprises me that very few people actually know this. So here it is…

Do you know you can group dates in pivot tables to show the report by week, month or quarter? I have learned this trick while doing analysis on a pivot table today. In this online lesson on pivot tables, I will teach you how to group dates in pivot tables to analyze the data by month, week, quarter or hour of day.

Over the weekend I spent some time to update the Excel Dashboards page. It now features more articles, downloads and resources for those of you making Excel Dashboards. Go ahead and check out the page here and let me know your feedback.

Moving on to this weeks excel and charting links worth checking.

Two charting principles we hear all the time are,

• Sort your data in a meaningful order before plotting it.
• Show only relevant information, not everything – because un-necessary information clutters the chart.

Today we will learn a dynamic charting technique that will mix these two ideas in a useful way. I call this a Top X chart.

Today we will learn a new and exciting excel formula – the all powerful SUMPRODUCT.

At the outset SUMPRODUCT formula may not seem like all that useful. But once you understand how excel works with lists (or arrays) of data, the SUMPRODUCT’s relevance becomes crystal clear.

Anyone working on the data using excel will know the importance of lookup formulas. They are vital for making almost any spreadsheet or dashboard. That is why when my friend John Franco, who maintains Excel-Spreadsheet-Authors.com, wrote to me about his new book Excel lookup toolbox I was truly excited. In this post I am going to share my review of this product.

We all have atleast one story of how that one time the boss / co-worker / classmate / cat ruined the carefully crafted excel spreadsheet by mucking up the formulas or disturbing the formatting. Read this post to learn 10 awesome excel tips to make better and boss-proof excel sheets.

Yesterday I read about interaction plots on junk charts where he points out the merits of an interaction plot. Interaction plots show interaction effects between 2 factors. For eg. you can show how your product sales have changed between year 1 and year 2 using an interaction plot like the one shown aside.

If only there is paste special for everything in life, things would be much more smoother and fun. Alas, the paste special is limited only to excel.

Here is a handy trick you can use to quickly scale up data validations set up in one cell to say a range of cells.

Just copy the cell by pressing CTRL+C and then go to the target cell(s) and press ALT+ESN. And your data validations are pasted in the new cells. That is all. Quick and Easy.

Check out an implementation of project dashboard along with tweetboard by our reader Fernando. He says, it “turned out to be a great success”. I am so happy for him.

Btw, the post includes a link to download the workbook so that you can see the dashboard and tweetboard in action.

We all know that data validation is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use data validation to create a drop-down list in a cell and limit the values user can enter. But, do you know that you can use data validation in a multitude of ways to prevent users from entering wrong data?

Here is a practical application: Prevent users from entering duplicate values in a range of cells.

For eg. you are making an invoice. Wouldn’t it be cool if Excel prompted you when you enter a duplicate line item so that increase the item quantity instead of repeating it.

Sanjay, my colleague is an avid programmer and excel enthusiast. In his spare time he wrote a small VBA macro to solve Sudoku. Sudoku is a very famous number based puzzle with a 9×9 grid of cells. Each of the 9 rows, columns and 3×3 blocks should be filled in such a way that they have all the numbers from 1 to 9. Sudoku is a very effective way to keep your brain cells ticking. I am a huge sudoku fan and I solve sudoku whenever I have few minutes to kill. So naturally I jumped with joy when I saw Sanjay’s excel macro for solving sudoku. He is kind enough to let me share this with all of you.