Excel Roundup 20131118

There’s always something new to learn about Excel, and it’s good to be reminded of a few old tricks.

For example, I’m sure you know that you can’t make a holiday meal without a spreadsheet, as this video shows. The spreadsheet section starts at the 1:57 mark, and continues a little later.

Contextures Posts

Here’s what I posted last week:

  1. Use MAX and IF to find the latest date that a product’s price was changed. Then, using the product name and that date, we can find the latest price for the product – even if it isn’t the highest price.
  2. After you create a pivot table, select one or more fields, and run this macro to change all the selected fields to SUM. Other fields are left unchanged.
  3. To look for external links in an Excel file, you can use a free add-in – FindLinks. Or, follow a few steps, and try to fix the links.
  4. Finally, for a humorous peek at what other people are saying about Excel, read this week’s collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.

Other Excel Articles

Here are a few of the Excel articles that I read last week, that you might find useful:

  1. Do you ever use the Window key on your computer keyboard? Chandoo shows how to use it as a quick way to paste as values
  2. For the perfect Christmas (or Thanksgiving) meal, be sure to use a spreadsheet! Read about the spreadsheet man in Sainsbury’s Christmas commercial, and you can download my holiday meal planner here.
  3. Do formulas that refer to their own sheet calculate faster than formulas that refer to other sheets? Charles Williams runs a few tests, and is surprised by the results.
  4. Even if you aren’t a cricket fan, take a look at the Excel dashboard that Chandoo created as a tribute to retiring player, Sachin Tendulkar.
  5. If you ever get a list of dates and tasks in Excel, Jimmy Pena (JP) show how to create Outlook tasks from that list, by using Excel VBA.
  6. If your data isn’t set up correctly, you can’t build a flexible pivot table. Microsoft’s Power Query add-in makes it easy to “unpivot” your data, and Ken Puls shows the steps on his Excel Guru blog.

What Did You Read?

If you read any other interesting Excel articles last week, that you’d like to share, please add a comment below.

Please include a brief description, and a link to the article.

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0 thoughts on “Excel Roundup 20131118”

  1. I managed to write a few guest posts this week that might be of interest to your readers.
    One over at Daily Dose of Excel has some pretty nifty code to help you filter pivots quickly based on an external list in the worksheet. See http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2013/11/14/filtering-pivots-based-on-external-ranges/
    And the other over at Chandoo’s blog shows how to set up your Personal Macro Workbook. See http://chandoo.org/wp/2013/11/18/using-personal-macro-workbook/

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