Excel Roundup 20160222

In this week’s roundup, Slicer trick, pivot charts, slow workbooks, dashboards, and more.

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

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.

Is Excel withdrawal even a thing? http://exceltheatre.com/blog/

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

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