In this week’s roundup, Slicer trick, pivot charts, slow workbooks, dashboards, and more.
1. Split Date and Time
Instead of using a complicated date formula, here are a couple of quick ways to split a combined date and time into two separate columns. One method uses a simple formula, and the other method just needs a bit of typing.
2. Excel Slicer Trick
On the Excel Campus blog, Jon Acampora shows a handy trick for creating a search box to use with a Slicer. This will make it much easier to find things, if the Slicer has a long list of items.
And remember, registration closes this Thursday (Feb 25th) for Jon’s VBA Pro Course.
3. Working With Charts
It reasonably easy to make a combination chart in Excel, to show some series in columns, and other series as lines. It’s not as easy to make a Bar-Line combination chart though, so Jon Peltier guides you through the steps.
You won’t be able to do that with a pivot chart though, because the “line” series is really a Scatter (X,Y) chart type, and those aren’t allowed. Jon also wrote everything you ever wanted to know about pivot charts last week, and he mentioned Contextures, so it must be a good article! There are a few pivot chart articles on my Pivot Table blog too.
4. Hero Weir-Ship
The always enthusiastic Jeff Weir is finally going to meet some of his Excel heroes – he’s registered for the upcoming Excel Summit South. I agree, it should be a great event, and a bit too far away for me. What do you think, after reading Jeff’s article – should those Microsoft guys be very afraid?
5. Slow Workbook
Lots of things can slow down a workbook, and some of those problems are hard to track down. Colin Legg just discovered some rogue INDIRECT formulas in a workbook that were causing calculation to grind to a halt in some cases. Use those Volatile functions wisely! And if you’re not sure which ones are volatile, Charles Williams has a list.
6. Excel Dashboards
Excel Dashboard Course: Mynda Treacy recently opened registration for her acclaimed Excel Dashboard course, and the registration deadline is Thursday, Feb. 25th. The course is a great investment, and you can read my review for the highlights, and more information. Get my new dashboard tools as a bonus with purchase -enter coupon code DebraD
Free Dashboard Webinars: Mynda is also 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.
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.
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