Excel Roundup 20160215

In this week’s roundup, Excel skills, make hyperlinks, dashboards, and more.

Excel Roundup http://blog.contextures.com/

1. Drop Down List Symbols

Drop down lists on a worksheet make it easy to enter data. For a bit of fun, you can use symbols, instead of words. I used heart symbols ♥ ♥ in my Excel Valentine card, and you could use happy faces, or other symbols in your worksheet.

Or, start working on your St. Patrick’s Day cards – use Alt + 5 (number keypad), to insert shamrock symbols ♣ ♣ ♣.

2. Excel Skills

Can an Excel beginner acquire “strong Excel skills” before a job interview? That’s the question that started this reddit thread, and it’s an interesting read. But remember, it is reddit, so don’t read if you’re offended by an off-colour comment or three.

3. Excel Training

Instead of faking your Excel skills, you can work on improving them! Here are a few upcoming courses.

  • Data Analysis: Chandoo’s new course, 50 Ways to Analyze Your Data, will start on February 24th. It’s not for everyone though, you need at least intermediate or higher level of Excel knowledge. The online course has 50 videos, covering vital skills like data analysis, data science, visualization of outputs, modeling business problems and finding best solutions. You can go at your own pace, and watch the videos in any order. To get all the details, click here.
  • Free Webinars: Mynda Treacy is offering two free one-hour webinars — 1) How to Build Excel Dashboards, and 2) Dashboards with Power Query and Power Pivot. Get the details, and sign up for a date and time that is convenient for you.
  • Excel Dashboards: Mynda has also opened registration for her acclaimed Excel Dashboard course, and you’ll get 20% off, if you sign up by Feb 18th. The course is a great investment, and you can read my review for more information. Bonus: Get my upcoming product,  dashboard tools (est. Feb 22), with coupon code DebraD

4. Create Hyperlinks

To make it easy for people to find files, Ben J. Kusmin shows how to create a list of hyperlinks on a worksheet. The file path information is entered in one cell, and a formula combines that with the file names.

5. Financial Models

On the Sophisticated Finance blog, Robert Harker has collected the links to his articles on Excel and Financial Models. The articles were written a few years ago, but the information is timeless.

6. Clean Your Data

How much time do you spend cleaning data in Excel? If your answer is “Too much!”, take a look at this list of top Excel data cleansing techniques, by John Michaloudis. There’s also a link to his podcast interview with master data cleanser, Oz du Soleil.

Note: If you’re reading it in Firefox, you can tap the Reader View icon in the Address Bar, to see the text in a big dark font, instead of the tiny grey font in the blog’s default view.

7. Excel Humour

Finally, for a bit of spreadsheet humour, you can see what people are saying about Excel, in my weekly collection of tweets. Here’s one of my favourite tweets from this week’s collection.

This week's best Excel tweets http://exceltheatre.com/blog/

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Excel Roundup http://blog.contextures.com/

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