10 Tips to Make Better and Boss-proof Excel Spreadsheets
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.
Switch Rows and Columns in Charts [Quick Charting Tip]
Let us say you have built a nice chart showing your sales and profits for the top 5 products (learn how to highlight top 5 products in a list), with products on X axis. Suddenly your boss wants to switch the rows to columns (or transpose the chart) so that she can see metric level grouping instead of product level grouping. No need to freak out and rush to Espresso machine, You can do it very easily with Excel Charting features.
In today’s quick tip you will learn how to swap chart rows and columns in excel.
Making Interaction Plots using Excel
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.
Prevent Duplicate Data Entry using Cell Validations
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.
Making a chart with dynamic range of values
We all know that to make a chart we must specify a range of values as input.
But what if our range is dynamic and keeps on growing or shrinking. You cant edit the chart input data ranges every time you add a row. Wouldn’t it be cool if the ranges were dynamic and charts get updated automatically when you add (or remove) rows?
Well, you can do it very easily using excel formulas and named ranges. It costs just $1 per each change. 😉
Ofcourse not, there are 2 ways to do this. One is to use Excel Tables and another is to use OFFSET formula.
Baby Feeding Chart using Excel
While feeding the babies last night, I had this idea. Why not make an excel sheet where you can keep track of the baby’s feeding and sleeping activities on day to day basis. It would probably help you understand your baby’s needs better and may be give you some insights.
Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report using Excel [Part 6 of 6]
Project management dashboards, project status reports help stakeholders, project sponsors and team-members can understand project status very quickly. In the last installment of project management using excel, learn how to make project management dashboard using excel in this tutorial. Also download the excel project status dashboard template.