Wow! It’s December already – how did that happen? It’s Cyber Monday too – a big online shopping day. Did you find any Excel bargains?
To start the countdown to Christmas, Mynda Treacy created an Advent Calendar in Excel. You can download the file, if you’d like a bit of fun while you count the days until Christmas
You’ll have to answer a quiz each day, to open the calendar doors. To get a head start, you can start thinking about the answer to the December 5th question, shown in the screen shot below.
Contextures Posts
Here’s what I posted recently:
- To fix data from another region, you can quickly change currency separators with the Text to Columns feature
- When you group dates in a pivot table, Excel creates extra items in the pivot table filter – see a couple of workarounds for this problem
- For a humorous peek at what other people are saying about spreadsheets, read the latest collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog. There is a poll at the end, so please vote for your favourite tweet.
Other Excel Articles
Here are a few of the Excel articles that I read recently, that you might find useful.
- At Macworld, Lou Hattersley compares the iPad versions of Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers. Which app do you think she recommends?
- Mu Lin offers 3 guidelines for designing data dashboards. The article focuses on news reports, but the tips can be applied to business dashboards too..
- Cells with drop down lists only show an arrow when selected, so Jon Acompora created a workaround, to always show an arrow.
- It’s hockey season here in Canada, but Tanner Bell is thinking about baseball, and uses pivot tables to calculate projected standings for the fantasy baseball draft.
- Charlotte Utting explains why Excel and R are useful together, and how you can connect them.
- Hui shows us how to calculate Pi by throwing hot dogs at Excel, and you can download his sample file. Just remember, it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye!
Excel Announcements
Here are some upcoming events, courses, recently published books, and other new items, related to Excel.
| ONLINE | PowerPivot Pro is offering a free online seminar today, Excel to Power Pivot: Cross the Gap Walkthrough.
Date: Today — Monday, Dec. 1st, 12 noon to 1 PM (Pacific time) |
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The ModelOff 2014 finalists have been selected, and you can attend the finals:
Sunday December 7, 2014 at Microsoft in New York |
ONLINE |
Registration is open for Felienne Hermans’ MOOC Course — Data Analysis: Take It to the MAX()
“Using video lectures and hands-on exercises, we will teach you cutting-edge techniques and best practices that will boost your data analysis and visualization skills.” You can audit this 8-week course for free, and classes start Apr. 6, 2015. |
Share Your Events and Articles
If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!
