Excel tips and tutorials
Did you eat too many Christmas cookies over the holidays? An extra dessert or two?
If it’s time to get back into shape, use this Excel weight loss tracker. It can store weekly weight records, calculate your weight loss, and show your progress in a weight loss chart.
Okay, it’s a day late, but here’s an Excel Advent calendar, for you to use during the month of December – for the first 24 days.
It’s almost April, and the snow tires are coming off my car today, so spring must be just around the corner. That means it’s time to start planning the garden.
We don’t actually plant anything in southern Ontario until the May 24th weekend, but a bit of planning will make it easier to survive the stampede at the garden centre on planting weekend.
I’ve found a few websites that have Excel garden planning workbooks, that you can download and adjust for your climate zone.
At the Compostings blog, there’s a workbook that lists crops, and when you should plant them indoors, then move them outdoors. Uh-oh, I should have started the basil a couple of days ago.
At the Everchanging Garden blog, there are instructions for sketching a garden plan in Excel, using the drawing tools.
At High Prairie Landscape Design, you can download an Excel Garden Budget, garden charts and a seed start chart.
There are lots more examples out there, or maybe you’ve already created your own garden workbooks in Excel.
Now let’s hope for some good growing weather this summer.
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It’s finally Friday, so here’s another Excel game to help you relax this weekend.
This is a Jawbreak game, adapted for Excel by Andy Pope, who is a very creative guy.
Like Doug Glancy’s Concentration game, this game is based on a UserForm, with a button on the worksheet to start the game.
The object is to clear all the balls from the screen, by selecting and deleting matching balls.
Remaining balls drop down to fill in the gaps, and when you clean an entire column, the other columns will shift left.
I enjoyed the game, which is simple to play, but takes a bit of thinking to plan your moves. It keeps a list of high scores, so you can try to beat your previous best.
You can download the Excel Jawbreak game from Andy’s website. While you’re there, take a few minutes to look at some of the other brilliant things that Andy has done.
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A couple of Fridays ago, in the What’s in Your Desk Drawer comments, Doug Glancy mentioned that he had created a concentration game in Excel.
One of my first Excel VBA programming fun projects was to write one for my daughter and I to play. It had multiple decks, 3 user modes and “animated” cards (the pairs moved across the screen to a pile when correctly selected). Somewhat fun to play, and a great learning experience.
Doug sent me a copy of the file, so you can see the game for yourself: Excel Concentration Game
When the file opens, you can enable the macros, so the game will run. There’s one worksheet, with a button that you click to start the game.
The game opens, with a deck of cards, turned face down. You select two cards and try to match the pictures.
The game records the number of clicks, time used, and the match count. I am very bad at this game!
There are game options, including number of players, and type of card.
Doug’s concentration game is built on a UserForm. In the sample file you can see all the code that makes it operate. It took me a couple of minutes to find the sets of cards – one for mammals and one for birds. They’re to the right of the visible area on the UserForm.
Do you know of any other free Excel games out there?
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Last week I saw a an article by Giles Thomas, who uses a Resolver One spreadsheet to play music.
If it can be done in another spreadsheet, Excel must be able to play music too, so I checked with the most likely suspect, John Walkenbach. Sure enough, he created an Excel midi-player that you can download.
NO LONGER AVAILABLE
John also has a Duelling Banjos Excel player, that he posted on his blog a couple of years ago.
Another way to get music in Excel is with this Excel Web Radio Streaming sample file, created by Harald Staff.
Harald’s web radio Excel workbook is small (47 kb), and easy to use.
To get the Excel file, and start your own music station, go to the Harald Staff Sample Files page in my Contextures site.
Even if you’re not musically gifted, you can still use Excel to help you enjoy your music collection.
Dave Peterson has created an Excel Music Playlist Creator that you can download.
The code in Dave’s workbook creates a playlist of music from a selected folder, and puts it on your desktop.
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Merry Christmas! Posting will be very light over the next week and a half (just the Excel Twitter posts), and will be back to normal on January 5th.
Thanks for reading the Contextures Blog and I look forward to sharing tips with you in 2009, and getting your much appreciated feedback.
There are more Excel Christmas trees on my Contextures site, so go and take a look at those ones too!
This short video shows how to build an Excel Christmas tree. There’s a scroll bar on the worksheet, and you use that to add decoration, one layer at a time.
This technique is done with NO macros!
There are lots more holiday workbooks on my Contextures site, on the following pages:
No, you don’t necessarily need treatment just because you like using Excel. 😉 Today’s post shows an Excel workbook that you can download, to plan a sequence of treatments, prescribed by your doctor.
In response to a newsgroup posting, Roger Govier created a workbook to help patients plan a sequence of treatments.
For example, people taking Warfarin, might be prescribed to take doses of 2 mg, 2mg, 3mg, 2mg, 5mg and then go back to the start of the sequence.
In the sample workbook, they would enter that sequence on the Setup sheet.
Muscular Dystrophy sufferers need to inject at different sites on the body each day.
That button runs an Excel macro, which has the sequence copied down, to fill the Treatments Column.
After the treatment list is created, switch to the Calendar sheet, to set up the current month.
The calendar will fill in with dates and treatment sequence.
You can download Roger’s sample file from the Excel Sample Spreadsheets page on my Contextures site.
In the Functions section, look for FN0016 – Treatment Calendar
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If you’re busy getting ready for a big family dinner today, you might find the dinner planner in this Excel workbook helpful.
At the top of the worksheet, you can enter your target dinner hour.
The entire timetable will be based on that entry, so choose wisely!
After you pick a dinner time, you can enter information for the dinner planning schedule.
When it has all the details, the Excel dinner planner calculates the start time for each item.
Then, sort the list by the Start Time column, to see all the preparation steps, in order that they need to be started.
I use this dinner planner for our all of our family dinners, and it’s a big help in scheduling, and staying on track.
I like to print out the preparation schedule, and keep it on the kitchen counter while we get the dinner ready.
There’s also a fancy Excel timeline chart, if you like to see visual overviews.
Who is going to peel the potatoes, and when should they start? That chore always takes way longer than you expect!
The Excel workbook also other helpful sheet, like this Holiday Spending tracker.
If you’re going to any of the Black Friday sales tomorrow, you can make a list of the items you want to buy, in column D
Then, when you get home from your successful shopping trip, enter the cost for each item in column E
And good luck out there — it can get wild in the malls at this time of year!
Here are a few more pages on my Contextures site, where you can find Excel files for help with holiday planning, or a bit of holiday fun and games.
There are sites that offer Christmas Planner templates, usually in pdf format, which you can download and print.
Then, store the printed sheets in a binder, and write out your task list, holiday budget, gift list and calendar.
I’m sure that helps people who are trying to organize a hectic holiday season, but Excel would be a better tool for all those lists and budgets.
So, with my daughter’s help, I created an Excel Christmas Planner that you can download from my web site.
Instead of hand writing your lists, and doing your budgeting on a calculator, enter all the details in an Excel workbook, and let it do the heavy lifting for you.
There are 15 sheets in the planner, currently, and we’ll add more, if we have new ideas.
For example, there’s an extended weekly calendar, so you can see what’s happening on specific days.
You can also make a list of upcoming tasks, keep a master gift list, keep costs in line with a holiday budget planner, and many more sheets.
The workbook includes a dinner planner, which will help you schedule the preparation for any large meal.
The dinner planner is helpful for smaller meals too, if they have lots of preparation steps!
You can get organized for the American Thanksgiving this week, or Christmas next month, or a weekend dinner party, any time of the year.
It’s our first draft of our Holiday Planner, so there’s probably much more that we could add. If you have any suggestions for improving it, we’d love to hear from you!
