Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Four years ago, we celebrated by creating Ireland’s flag in Excel.
The flag is a simple column chart, with the 3 columns coloured to match the flag’s design. It’s an easy project, so you’ll be done in time to go out to celebrate.
The blog post also has a video of some festive Canadian Irish music, featuring Great Big Sea, playing with The Chieftains.
I’ve linked to it again this year, at the end of this post. The music will get your toes tapping, while you work on Excel projects today.
Contextures Posts
Here’s what I posted last week:
- After applying an AutoFilter, use this trick to show the top 10 values in the visible rows.
- If the items in a pivot table Report Filter drop down are out of order, here’s how to sort them.
- Roger Govier shared his technique for creating multiple dependent drop downs, based on Excel tables.
- 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:
- Did you read any of the articles that explained how Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s former CEO, used Excel to balance his work and family time? He said “a spreadsheet”, but I’m sure he meant Excel. Or could he still be using MultiPlan?
- The FrankensTeam did a guest post on Jon Peltier’s blog, showing their approach to plotting gaps in Excel charts.
- Jon Acampora recommends the best keyboards if you like to use Excel’s keyboard shortcuts. My laptop looks like most of the “bad” pictures in the article.
Excel Resources
Here are some upcoming events, courses and new books, related to Excel.
- Registration is open for the Amsterdam Excel Summit. The one-day event runs on May 14, 2014, and features sessions by several Excel MVPs, such as Bill Jelen (Mr. Excel), Ken Puls and Charles Williams. All the sessions are in English, and the limit is 100 participants, so sign up now, if you’re interested.
What Did You Read?
If you read (or wrote) any other interesting Excel articles recently, that you’d like to share, please add a comment below, or send me an email.
Please include a brief description, and a link to the article.
Toe Tapping Music
Here’s the video, to put you in the St. Patrick’s Day mood – Lukey, by Great Big Sea, with The Chieftains.
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Hi Deb,
I posted a new article on my blog on how to use Cartesian Products in MS Access and MS Query to generate random data: http://dataprose.org/2014/03/its-a-cartesian-product-dummy/
Kind regards,
Winston
Thanks Winston! Glad you posted the link.
Hi Debra,
I hope I did not offend your laptop keyboard. 🙂 Most of those “bad” pics are of my laptop, so it does not have the best layout for keyboard shortcuts either. Most laptops don’t… Thanks for the link!
Thanks Jon! My laptop isn’t offended, but those key positions do cause problems sometimes. I frequently turn off Num Lock accidentally, and sometimes end up in insert mode. At least it has a number pad!
Ah yes the old Num Lock issue. That’s a good one I should add to the article. Just out of curiosity, what laptop do you use?
It’s an Asus N76V. Nice sized screen and keyboard, but a few strangely placed keys.
That’s a nice looking laptop. Reminds me a bit of the Macbook. I like that the Ctrl key is to the left of the Fn key. I can see how the Num Lock placement could be an issue. It’s pretty close to the Backspace and Home keys. There was a recent LinkedIn discussion started by Bill about the F1 key, and one of the comments suggested using a paperclip to prevent the key from being pressed. Might work for your Num Lock.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Have-you-ever-removed-F1-1057417.S.193788581
Thanks for the link! Chip Pearson used to recommend prying the F1 key off the keyboard.
When I start a new job, the first three things I do is prize off the Caps Lock, Num Lock, and Insert keys from my keyboard, and then put them in a safe place. Then the last thing I do when I leave for the next job is give up looking for that safe place.
Jeff, when you start your next job, you could just send those keys to the person who has taken over your last job.
That is VERY funny!
I use a Razer Anansi gamer’s keyboard because it’s got 12 extra programmable keys I can assign my frequently-used macros to. When I got it, I said to the store clerk “Go ahead – ask me what I play”. He asked, and I replied “Excel VBA!”