All articles with 'tricks' Tag

Who said Excel takes lot of time / steps do something? Here is a list of 15 incredibly fun things you can do to your spreadsheets and each takes no more than 5 seconds to do. Happy Friday 🙂 1. Change the shape / color of cell comments Just select the cell comment, go to […]

RSS feeds are everywhere. So much that you cannot avoid them in your data processing, analytics or day to day spreadsheet needs. If you can get the RSS feeds to excel sheet you can do pretty interesting things with it, like: Prepare a sheet to watch deals on Amazon, Craigslist, Deals2buy and other favorite sites […]

change-sort-orientation-excel-columns You can sort data across columns instead of rows by changing sort options. If you ever had to sort across columns now you know a simple way to do this 🙂 Follow these steps for changing sort orientation: Select the table you want to sort (just the data, not the headers as when you […]

Bullet graphs provide an effective way to dashboard target vs. actual performance data, the bread and butter of corporate analytics. Howmuchever effective they are, the sad truth is there is no one easy way to do them in excel. I have prepared a short tutorial that can make you a dashboard ninja without writing extensive […]

I can never get tired of in-cell charts, whenever I get sometime, I try to experiment something on them. Here is an idea to design true incell column charts without using any add-ins or installing fonts. These charts can be fun to have on your project report or annual news letter or memos, they take […]

Jon @ Peltiertech has taken a critical look at the partition charts suggested yesterday. You can read his review of the partition charts here. One of the commenters on his site said, Jon, the partition chart is not that bad. It just needs to be defragmented… 🙂 So I de-fragmented my partition chart, this time […]

Next time you had to create a pie chart, consider building a partition chart as these charts can reveal trend information along with how much each pie is contributing. What more? They are as easy to create as eating a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream 🙂 I made a sample partition chart based on […]

I was doing some weird analysis on corporate mission statements and I had to count the number of words in each cell. That is when I realized there is no formula to calculate the number of words in a cell, I was too lazy to write an UDF for that, so I figured out a […]

Paste or Ctrl+v is probably the most effective productivity tool available to us. But how well do you know “Paste”?, do you know that there are many variations to paste data to your excel sheets? Surprised? Well, read this post to become a master paster 🙂 After copying your data, You can activate Paste Special […]

Often you may want to fill a column only with weekday dates instead of all dates. Here is a simple trick you can use instead of writing nifty if formulas or manually entering the weekday dates. When you auto fill dates by dragging mouse (or using menu > edit > fill > series > selecting […]

Let us learn a simple charting hack to create a thermo-meter chart in excel. This type of charts can be effective in communicating one data point, they can make excellent presentation slide or dashboard widget. What more, they are as simple to do as adding whipped cream to your latte. So lets begin: 1. First […]

While trying to spell check one my sheets I have learned this cool trick to fetch real time stock quotes without any webqueries or vba or anything. First enter the stock code in a cell (this works for US stocks only), for eg. AAPL for Apple, MSFT for Microsoft etc. Then ALT+CLICK on that cell, […]

Imagine you have long list of data and you need to quickly identify which of the items are unique. You can use Advanced Filters to do this. Just select the list of items you want to filter, go to menu > Data > Filter > Advanced filter. You will see a dialog box like this: […]

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 […]