All articles with 'videos' Tag

Working with multiple charts (or drawing shapes / images) can be a very slow process. But here is a secret to boost your productivity.

Use selection pane & select object tools

Selection Pane & Select Objects?

If you have never heard of these, don’t worry. These are 2 very powerful features hidden in Excel. Once you know how to unlock them, you will never look back.

How to use selection pane & select object tools to work with charts faster – Video

In this video, understand how to use these powerful features to work with charts faster.

Making your workbooks, charts, dashboards & presentations beautiful is a time consuming process. It is a mix of art & craft. Naturally, we spend hours polishing that important slideshow or visualization. But do you know about simple features in Excel that can save you a lot of time and help you create gorgeous output?

Here is a simple way to enhance your Excel charts – use shapes & pictures in your charts.

We will learn how to create something like above.

Looks interesting? Read on…

A significant portion of our time in Excel is spent navigating between various ribbon tabs and clicking buttons. Wouldn’t it be better if you can combine all the frequently used features in to one ribbon? Something like above:

Read on to learn how to create, edit and share custom ribbons in Excel.

We, adults can’t escape three things:

1. Deadlines
2. Demanding bosses (replace with customers or nagging spouses or naughty kids)
3. Taxes

While I can’t help you with demanding bosses or taxes, when it comes to deadlines, I have the right tool for you.

A tracker that highlights all overdue items so that you know where to focus your attention.

Let’s learn how to use awesome powers of Excel to find-out which items are due. You can apply these concepts to nail down over due invoices, pending project tasks or scheduling workforce.

Sparklines are fun and very insightful. They are easy to create, easy to maintain and fit into any dashboard.

But there is one tiny problem with them. Usually we have a lot of data, but we don’t to visualize all of it. We just want to visualize latest 30 days trend or last 12 months trend or QTD or something similar. What then?

In this video, learn a powerful and very simple way to create dynamic sparklines using Excel.

Few days ago, I asked you “How many hours did Billy work?” There were more than 100 responses with lots of innovative solutions.

So today, let’s examine various ways to calculate total working hours given start & end times of tasks. Please watch below video.

Calculating Bill’s total working hours (video)

Here are three questions you often hear from your boss:

1. What changes are happening in our business and how do they look?
2. Do you know how to operate this new coffee machine?
3. Why does every list has 3 items?

Jokes aside, our urge to find change in environment predates cave drawing, slice bread and Tommy Lee Jones. So, today let’s examine a very effective chart that tells the story of change and re-create it in Excel.

True story:

On Friday (17th April – 2015), I flew from Vizag (my town) to Hyderabad so that I can catch a flight to San Francisco to attend a conference. As I had 10 hours of overlay between the flights in Hyderabad, I checked in to a lounge area so that I can watch some sports, eat food while pretending to do work on my laptop. There was a gentleman sitting in adjacent space doing some work in Excel. As I began to compose few emails, the gentleman in next sitting space asked me what I do for living. Our conversation went like this.

Me: I run a software company
He: Oh, so you must be good with computers
Me: smiles and cringes at the stereotyping
He: What is the formula to select all the blank cells in my Excel data and highlight them in Yellow color

Mind you, he had no idea that I work in Excel. We were 2 random guys in airport lounge watching sports and eating miserable food.

Me: Well, what are you trying to do?
He: You see, I am auditing this data. I need to locate all the blank rows and set them in different color so that my staff can fill up missing information. Right now, I am selecting one row at a time and filling the colors. Is there a one step solution to this problem?

Needless to say, I showed him how to do it faster, which led to an interesting 3 hours at the lounge.

End of true story.

So today, let’s understand how to find & highlight all the blank cells in the data.

Last week, I asked my email newsletter readers to submit “one data analysis problem you are struggling with”. We called it BYOD – Bring your own data. More than 100 people have emailed various interesting (and often very difficult) problems. This week (between 16th of February to 20th of February), let’s take a look at some of these problems and solve them.

Consolidating data in different shapes

We can use either VBA or Excel’s consolidation features to combine data that has same shape (ie same number & type of columns). Here is one way to do it.

But what if we need to consolidate data that is in different shapes?

Something like above.

In such cases, we can use 3 powerful tools.

1. Multiple Consolidation Ranges – Pivot Tables
2. VBA
3. Power Query

So let’s examine how to use these approaches to consolidate data in different shapes.

Just a quick announcement.

As you may know, I will be speaking at PASS Business Analytics conference in Santa Clara this April (between 20th & 22nd). As a run up to the event, the good folks at PASS are conducting free webinars on various topics of Excel.

Here are 2 topics on which I am doing webinars. You can watch them and pick up some really cool Excel skills. Just click on below links to enjoy them.

1. 5 Dashboard mistakes to avoid (watch it any time)
2. Excel charting – productivity tips (live on February 3rd)

That is all for now. See you in the webinar.

We analysts like to compare. If you ever want to keep an analyst busy, just give her 2-3 options. She won’t return to your desk until the cows come home. My wife uses this trick all the time. Picture this:

[In late 2013]
Me: I want to buy a new phone
She: Do you want Nexus 5 or Galaxy S5 or iPhone 5s?

Its late 2014 and I am not done comparing.

So today, let’s talk about an interesting comparison scenario.

Comparing by letter or word

See above demo to understand the concept. Read more to learn how to do this.

Recently my iPhone 4 crashed. It is 3.5 years old. And just like any other 3 year old, it started acting weird & crazy one night. The next morning it went silent. It won’t go beyond the Apple logo whenever I start it. Since I couldn’t wait for the phone to start, I took out the SIM card (the phone is unlocked, if you are wondering) and placed it in my old Nokia phone. But alas, none of my contacts are on the SIM. They are in “cloud”.

After a day of answering phone calls from everyone including my mom as “Chandoo here”, I’ve decided to get my contacts back. So I logged in to iCloud to download a backup. And the backup was a .VCF file.

Since I wanted to have all my contact numbers in a spreadsheet, I did what any Excel nerd would do. I built a template that can convert VCF data to Excel worksheet.

Hello folks,

Its almost ready. Our ready to use Excel dashboard templates are coming to a spreadsheet near you on November 13th.

Here is a teaser preview of the dashboards. Our own official trailer, rated A for awesome.

Watch it below:

http://youtu.be/2-TvjpEKf-o

(see it on our YouTube Channel, alternative link)

Excel Dashboard Templates – What are they?

As the name suggests, these a set of workbooks where you can key in your data, set up how you want the looks & bam, a beautiful, insightful, fun, easy to use dashboard pops right out. All in few minutes.

Here is how these templates can help you:

• Design awesome dashboards in minutes, not months: Don’t waste hours trying to figure out formulas, chart settings and layouts. Instead focus on what your users want, how your business works and use those insights to tell the ‘Excel Dashboard Template’ what you want. Save time and look awesome.
• Accommodate change elegantly: People change. Businesses change. What your boss wanted last month is no longer what she wants today. So when someone asks you, “hmm, can you show me YTD data instead of last 13 months”, or “Can I see top 10 KPIs instead of all”, you just smile and tap a few clicks and bingo, the new dashboard will be ready. These templates are designed to handle change (data, requirements, design preferences and insights).
• Customize everything: Unlike a template set in stone, these are designed to let you customize almost every little aspect of the output, calculations and behavior.
• Beautiful & Informative: These templates are designed with a delicate balance of beauty & insight. Everything is seamlessly designed, perfectly aligned and precisely calculated so that you & your boss can focus on the insights & decisions. Time tested and well honored visualization principles & guidelines are observed thru-out the reports.
• Built for starters, built for pros: Whether you are just starting with Excel or a seasoned pro, you can find the templates right up your alley. For advanced users, we have many customizations to whet your appetite. Want to build a custom calculation or include another type of sorting, you can do it by tinkering with ‘calculations’ sheet.

Recently, I saw this chart on Economist website.

It is trying to depict how various cities rank on livability index and how they compare to previous ranking (2014 vs 2009).

As you can see, this chart is not the best way to visualize “Best places to live”.

Few reasons why,

• The segregated views (blue, gray & red) make it hard to look for a specific city or region
• The zig-zag lines look good, but incredibly hard to understand % changes (or absolute changes)
• Labels are all over the place, thus making data interpretation hard.
• Some points have no labels (or ambiguous labels) leading to further confusion.

After examining the chart long & hard, I got thinking.

Its no fun criticizing someones work. Creating a better chart from this data, now thats awesome.