Excel Roundup 20151005

In this week’s roundup, get started with Office 2016, nominations for a Spreadsheet Hall of Fame, and much more.

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

1. Spreadsheet Hall of Fame

Last week, I heard that voting was open for the Toy Hall of Fame. Battleship is one of the finalists this year, and it’s similar to Excel, so I voted for that.

Then it dawned on me that there should be a Spreadsheet Hall of Fame, so that’s my goal for this year’s Spreadsheet Day (October 17th – mark your calendar!).

Who or what should be included? People? Programs? Functions? Features? There is a short survey at the end of this blog post, so add your nomination for the first inductees. Next week I’ll post the finalists (the top vote getters), and you can vote for one of those finalists.

2. Office 2016

If you’ve installed Office 2016, download the free Quick Start Guides from the Microsoft website. The Excel 2016 guide is 4 pages, and features a lovely doughnut chart on the first page.

3. Quickly Convert Old Format Workbooks

David Ringstrom shows how to add a command on Excel’s Quick Access Toolbar, so you can quickly convert an xls format workbook into a new format. This is a great time-saver, if you have to convert lots of files. The article has some background details at the beginning, and the quick tip is at the end.

4. Power BI

Ken Puls shows another cool trick for Power Query – allocating a specific number units over a range of dates. You can download his sample file, and follow along with the tutorial. This is one of the many useful topics Ken and Miguel teach in their Power Query course.

Jeffrey Wang has moved to a new blog for Power BI DAX topics, and his first article shows how to use a calculated table to figure out monthly subscriber churn.

5. Remove Excel Filters

Doug Glancy posted a handy bit of code that lets you remove filters from all columns except those that are part of the current selection. The code even checks to make sure that all the cells are in the same table or filtered range. If you build filterable lists for other people to use, add this code to a button above a table, so they quickly remove some filters.

6. Excel Slicers

In the newer versions of Excel, Slicers are a great tool for filtering pivot tables and named Excel tables. John Michaloudis shows a few ways to filter those Slicers – they work with more than just the mouse left click.

Also, John’s Excel courses, including the Xtreme Pivot Table Course, are 30% off for now, in celebration of Excel’s 30th anniversary. Use coupon code EXCEL30

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.

twitter20151002b

8. Spreadsheet Hall of Fame Nominations

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

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