Excel Roundup 2014013

In The Guardian’s Data Blog column, where the tagline is “Facts are Sacred”, things took a less lofty turn last week. You can go back to the good old days in math class, where you entertained your friends by writing words on your calculator.

In the screen shot below, you can see the cheerful greeting from our Sharp Compet CS-1130 financial calculator. I’m not sure how old it is, but it’s probably from the 1980s, and still working well. Are you still using an old school calculator?

calculatorhello

Contextures Posts

Here’s what I posted last week:

  • Calculate upcoming anniversaries for employee hire dates, and highlight them with Excel conditional formatting.
  • Dynamic date range filters aren’t available in pivot table Report Filters — only in Row and Column filters. Use this workaround show a date range, without the date details.
  • There’s a new sample file in my Excel UserForm course, with search boxes that let you find specific records, then update or delete them.
  • 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.

More Excel Articles

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

  • Apparently there is a problem with promiscuous spreadsheet headings, especially in the government. Were you aware of this? Are you guilty of this bad behaviour?
  • On the Data Scopic blog, Oz du Soleil asks a few spreadsheet experts, where are Excel & Google Spreadsheet Headed? You can read Part 1 and Part 2

Power BI Articles

It was a busy week for articles about Microsoft’s Power BI tools, so I’ve given them a separate section. Also, see the 24 Hour PASS webinars in the Upcoming Courses section, below.

  • Maybe this is what prompted all the articles — Microsoft announced its Power BI pricing last week, and you can see the plans and prices here.
  • Dick Moffatt describes the challenges and satisfaction of moving a high-maintenance Excel solution to a zero-maintenance PowerPivot model. Take a minute and leave a comment, to let Dick know what you think.

Upcoming Courses

No matter how long you’ve been using Excel, there’s always something new to learn.

  • Sign up for one or more of the free Business Analytics webinars offered in the 24 Hour PASS series, sponsored by Microsoft, Cisco and Dell. Topics inlclude: “Advanced Analytics in Excel 2013”, “Querying in DAX”, and”Predictive Analytics for Absolute Beginners”. The online sessions run on Feb 5th and 6th, and you can see the schedule here: 24 Hour PASS Schedule
  • Mynda Treacy’s Excel Dashboard course opens for registration tomorrow, Jan 14th. I highly recommend this online course, which has excellent content, and great student support from Mynda. Click the banner below, for more information.

Excel Dasboard Course

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 2014013”

  1. Hello! Thanks for sharing my blogpost about Excel and Google spreadsheet.
    Here’s an article that helped me today:
    http://excelandaccess.wordpress.com/2013/07/27/how-do-excel-tables-remember-formulas/
    I was struggling with a formula in an Excel table. I tried to get rid of the formula but certain actions would bring the formula back. Zack Barresse pointed me to this blogpost that showed me how to look into the xml. It was very insightful to see how tables look “under the hood.”
    I ended up deleting the column and re-building it from scratch.

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