Last Friday, Microsoft’s Excel team hosted an AMA on Reddit, where anyone could submit a question about Excel. You can read all the questions and replies at this link.
It looks like the event went very well, so they might host another one sometime in the future. What would you ask the Excel team, if you had the chance? Think of your questions now, so you’ll be ready for the next opportunity.
Here’s one of the questions, and an answer by program manager, Ben Rampson:
Q: Do you guys ever see a use for Excel that you didnt even think was possible. Crazy forumals, etc
A: I’ve seen lots of crazy uses of Excel that I never expected. Some of my favorites:
- A customer issue escalation from NASA complaining the space shuttle launch would be delayed by a few months if we didn’t address the problem they found.
- A customer escalation from military with a business justification that was basically “innocent people will die” because of shapes being shifted over a few pixels in a spreadsheet.
- A manufacturing company that used Excel to run robots responsible for testing the electronics they were building on a manufacturing line. The amount of code they had written around their spreadsheet shocked me.
Contextures Posts
Here’s what I posted last week:
- Here’s how I cleaned an imported list in Excel, and split one column of data into 2 columns. There are other suggestions in the comments too.
- Can you send out a pivot table and prevent people from seeing all the source data? It’s not an easy task, but there are a few options that you can try.
- You can add headers to a combo box drop down list, so the columns are easier to understand.
- Finally, for a humorous peek at what other people are saying about Excel, read this week’s collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.
Other Excel Articles
Here are a few of the Excel articles that I read last week, that you might find useful:
- You can’t use ActiveX controls on a Macintosh, so Prof. Lee Townsend shows how to create dependent drop downs using Form control combo boxes.
- And speaking of the Mac, one of the earliest spreadsheets was Trapeze. Its creator, Andrew Wulf, has decided to build a simple version of Trapeze from scratch for the iPad.
- Doug Glancy found that the SheetActivate event isn’t triggered if a workbook has multiple windows, so he added a workaround.
- I don’t want to be overly optimistic, but it looks like winter is finally over. At Neoformix, Jeff Clark used the weather data to show that winter in the Toronto area was the coldest in 20 years. You could download data for your area, and make a similar report in Excel.
- Scott Lyerly discovered that you can use VBA with the Ribbon in Microsoft Project, so why can’t you do something similar in Excel?
- How much money will you need to retire? The Blunt Bean Counter shares a retirement planning spreadsheet, and there a couple of other links in the comments.
Excel Resources
Here are some upcoming events, courses and new books, related to Excel.
- Registration is open for the Amsterdam Excel Summit. The one-day event runs on May 14, 2014, and features sessions by several Excel MVPs, such as Bill Jelen (Mr. Excel), Ken Puls and Charles Williams. All the sessions are in English, and the limit is 100 participants, so sign up now, if you’re interested.
- The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group – EuSpRIG –has announced the preliminary program for Eursprig 2014. This event will be held in Delft (Netherlands) on July 3, 2104.
Excel Dashboards and Reports for Dummies, by Mike Alexander.
336 pages, published March 31, 2014
Learn to: Analyze data and report it in a way that makes sense; slice and dice data from different perspectives; create eye-catching and understandable reports, visualizations, and dashboards; automate redundant reporting
Dashboarding and Reporting with Power Pivot and Excel, by Kasper de Jonge.
195 pages, published April 1, 2014
This book, written by a member of Microsoft’s Power Pivot team, provides a practical step by step guide on creating a financial dashboard. The book covers in detail how to combine and shape the relevant data, build the dashboard in Excel, providing layout and design tips and tricks, prepare the model to work with fiscal dates, and show values used in many financial reports.
What Did You Read or Write?
If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, that you’d like to share, please add a comment below, or send me an email. Please include a brief description, and a link to the article.
[Update] Thanks for suggesting the following articles:
- Randy Rhea advises us to use a delimiter that’s not in the data, for easier imports.
- To help organize your data, Randy suggests using a macro that enters the date and user’s initials in a task list.
- Barb Darrow doesn’t think that Excel on the iPad is much use, if it doesn’t have macros.
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