All articles with 'tips' Tag

Of all the charting features in Excel, Sparklines are my absolute favorite. These bite-sized graphs can fit in a cell and show powerful insights. Edward Tufte coined the term sparkline and defined it as,

intense, simple, word-sized graphics

Sparklines (often called as micro-charts) add rich visualization capability to tabular data without taking too much space. This page provides a complete tutorial on Excel sparklines.

So you have built that excel report your boss wanted. And you were all eager to use the spreadsheet in your presentation. But in the last minute, your boss asked you to change average sales to total sales figures. You also want to grab an espresso before rushing to the meeting. Now what?

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

Offset() function to Calculate IRR for Dynamic Range When you start the project can you be sure, for how long will you operate it? A VC gives you funds to buy a commercial project. You are to operate the project for some time and then sell it off! Can you tell me today, when you […]

On a cup of green tea with a friend I grabbed the golden rule of accounting. It is simple (You can easily miss if it came your way!) and can be applied to almost all the accounts (Depreciation, Gross Block, Cash, Equity, Debt) – You name it, and you have to use it! So concentrate […]

Chandoo.org is all about simplifying life using Excel. When I first started visiting the site, I was amazed at the amount of information on the site, which made your life easier. My next few posts would be about excel functions which can make your life for Financial Modeling easier! These are simple examples that you […]

In the last installment of excel 2010 features, we will explore the backstage view (or file menu) in Excel 2010.
Background on Backstage view:

Most of the windows based applications have a File menu. This is the usual place you go to create, open, save, save as, print and close. In Office 2007, Microsoft ditched menu based navigation and introduced Ribbon. They moved all the formatting, pivot, charting, formula, print etc. options to various individual ribbon tabs. But they couldn’t move the functionality of File menu to a separate ribbon. Instead, they moved all this functionality to Office button – a clone of file menu.

Starting Excel 2010, you can finally customize the ribbon UI and define your own tabs or groups. This can be a huge productivity boost for people using MS Office applications. In this post, learn how to customize excel ribbon to improve your productivity.

Francis J Hayes runs probably one of the most popular excel news letters. His email newsletter, called as “The Excel Addict” has an interesting nugget, tip or trick every week. I have been reading his emails for the last few months and I really enjoy them. So naturally I got curious when I heard about Francis’ e-book titled “101 Secrets of a Microsoft Excel Addict“. Yesterday I purchased a copy of the book and there are so many hidden gems in the book that I had to tell you about it.

This is part 3 of 6 on Profit & Loss Reporting using Excel series, written by Yogesh Data sheet structure for Preparing P&L using Pivot Tables Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet Adding Calculated Fields to Pivot Table P&L Exploring Pivot Table P&L Reports Quarterly and Half yearly Profit Loss Reports in Excel Budget […]

In office 2007 (and 2010) you can immediately collapse the ribbon by pressing CTRL+F1. Thanks to Loranga for sharing this tip. More ribbon goodness | Free e-book to learn Excel Ribbon

Every year, on 4th Thursday of November, folks in US celebrate Thanksgiving day. A similar holiday exists in Canada too, they celebrate it on Second Monday of Every October.We will celebrate thanksgiving in PHD style, by sharing a wacky formula tip.

Today, we are going to learn how to use excel formulas to find out thanksgiving day’s date for any year.

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…

I could barely sleep last night. Even though I came home, my heart was in that hospital room only. I got up at 5:30, and came to see my wife and kids by 7:30. Now that they all are sleeping, I can quickly whip an excel post, to help you make twins, clones and duplicates.

Over the last few years, there has been much debate about the merits and perils of Microsoft Ribbon UI in Excel 2007. Personally I think ribbon is a good way to explore an application. I have gotten used to it since I tested excel 2007 for first time. Now, during the rare occasions I work […]