Excel Roundup 20160208

In this week’s roundup, find Excel help, new functions, Excel conferences, and much more.

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

1. Run Code on Double-Click

In my Data Validation Multi-Select Kit, or other Excel code, make a small change to run faster in large workbooks. Instead of setting up the code to run when a cell is selected, change it to run when a cell is double-clicked.

2. New Excel Functions

If you have a click-to-run version of Excel that you get through an Office 365 subscription, you should see some new functions in Excel now. Chris Webb describes the new text functions – CONCAT and TEXTJOIN. Now you can select a range of cells, and combine the text in them, instead of adding each cell individually.

There are two other new functions, IFS and SWITCH, and a new Funnel chart type. Ken Puls takes a quick look of those, and he’s happy about a Power Query update too.

3. Search for Excel Help

Could you get your Excel work done if Google was down for the day? We used to have massive reference books on our shelves, and now we get Excel help from Google. If you sometimes have trouble finding what you need, Brad Edgar shares 8 ways to search for Excel content. I use tip #4 to look for stuff on my own site! (warning – persistent popup form)

4. I’m Not Dead!

On the Analyst Cave blog, Tom asks if VBA is dead, and shares his opinion of what lies ahead. Do you agree? And when you read one of these “X is Dead” headlines, do you think of Monty Python’s Holy Grail? “I’m not dead!”

5. Worksheet Protection

Did you know that you can protect a worksheet with one string of characters, and unprotect it with a different characters? On the ExcelMate blog, Tom Urtis explains why that can happen. So, if a workbook contains information that people shouldn’t see – don’t share it with them!

6. Excel Conferences

A quick reminder that there are three Excel conferences in the next few months. There were still a few seats available, when I last heard updates, so if you’re interested, don’t wait too long to register.

  • Microsoft is hosting the Microsoft Data Insights Summit, March 22-23, 2016, in Bellevue, WA. The summit will focus on Excel and Power BI, and you can check out the session list to see what will be covered. The registration fee is $299 US, which is a great deal for a two-day conference!
  • Registration is now open for this year’s Amsterdam Excel Summit, on May 26th. There is also an Excel Charting and Dashboard Master Class on the following day – May 27th. There is an impressive list of experts who are participating, and an interesting tentative program.

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.

twitter20160205b2

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

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