All articles with 'tricks' Tag

Excel concatenate() is seriously crippled, it can add 2 or more strings together, as long as they are supplied as separate parameters. This means, when you have a range of cells with text which you want to add up to create a large text, you need to write an ugly looking biggish concatenate() or use […]

One of the most frequent tasks for any manager is “planning”, be it putting together a hiring schedule or designing a jumbo jet, it all starts with a simple project plan and gantt chart is simple and intuitive representation of the same. But how to make a gantt chart in excel without writing too many […]

Ever since writing the create in-cell pie charts in excel, I have been itching to find a simple enough method to do incell bar graphs. An in-cell bar would probably be more useful and cuter than an in-cell pie as it can instantly provide trending details. What more, these would probably look gorgeous when printed […]

Here is a ridiculously easy trick to do nice incell pie charts in excel, what more, they will make you look like a charting wizard. Download free pie chart font from here (direct download link). The font has 21 pie chart codes starting with empty circle (character ‘a’) and ending with full circle (character ‘u’) […]

After seeing DI’s Open Your Favorite Websites Directly from Windows Vista Start post, I thought why not use Windows XP Run dialog box as a search box. So here is a simple trick that can enable you to open your favorite sites directly from XP’s run dialog box. Using this trick you can type “g […]

I was toying with the idea of creating a tag cloud in excel – as a form of new visualization, this could be useful when you have medium amounts of data (eg: 50-300 rows) and you want to emphasize on what is important and what is not. I would imagine using a tag-cloud, When you […]

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 […]

Do you know that you can use excel find – replace dialog to change cell formats? Often we prepare a report or project plan and our boss or someone else in the team feels that all the red color cells need to change to blue or something similar, worry not, you can use find-replace (ctrl+h) […]

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 […]