Category: Excel tips

In this week’s roundup, look for formula inconsistencies, save time with keyboard shortcuts, use online Power BI and many more tips.

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150504”

In this week’s roundup, make VLOOKUP faster, use keyboard shortcuts, run macros when Excel is closed, and many more tips.

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150427”

IN this week’s roundup, you’ll learn about arrays and array formulas, see how to speed up macros, and many more tips.

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150420”

This week, attend a free dashboard webinar, find data with VLOOKUP, create a funnel chart, and many more tips.

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150413”

This week, see how to add a table of contents in a workbook, customize the right-click menu, pick a random winner, and many more tips.

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150406”

This week, see how to highlight items in a dashboard, change the background colour in a chart, use Excel for project management, and many more tips.

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150330”

Have you used PowerMap in Excel? Microsoft’s Excel team used it to illustrate the White House budget in 3D. You can read the details, and download the Excel file from their blog.

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150323”

In this short video, Sara Silverstein shows how to analyze several years of NCAA revenue data, by using a pivot table. Can you predict which sport brings in the biggest revenues?

Or watch on YouTube: Use Excel pivot tables to analyze massive data sets

Contextures Posts

Here’s what I posted recently:

• Highlight numbers that are found in another list, with conditional formatting. This example uses lottery numbers, and you could use the same technique for other types of lists, such as names, or dates.

• For a humorous peek at what other people are saying about spreadsheets, read the latest collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.

Other Excel Articles

Here are a few of the Excel related articles that I read recently, that you might find useful.

• Matthew Eaton uses a simple table, and a Pareto chart, to track his personal habits, and calculate his success rate.

• In a follow up to the ActiveX control problems caused by a Microsoft Security update in December, Jan Karel Pieterse announced that Microsoft’s March 10th update should automatically fix the problem.

• Aaron Souppouris takes a look at the new Office 2016 for Mac preview. He suggests that you try it, and warns you to “keep Office 2011 around for the important stuff.”
• Which would you choose to have in your workbook – an Excel Table, or Custom Views? Gašper Kamenšek would like to have both!

• John Weathington lists 5 things that every data scientist should know about Excel. He claims it’s been his secret weapon for decades, but the article’s tone seems condescending.

• Jeff Weir wants to know which features you’d like to see improved in Excel? Or do you thinks it’s perfect, just the way it is?

• In last week’s roundup, Doug Glancy suggested a great story about data interpretation, in an excerpt from the book, How Not to be Wrong. Scroll down to the section titled, Abraham Wald And The Missing Bullet Holes.

• Chris Webb adds the AGGREGATE function to his table, so he can use Slicers to filter his Power Query results. You can download the sample file, to see how it works.

• Is your budget spreadsheet a bully? Kathleen Elkins, at Business Insider, found a way to conquer hers, and find a bit of happiness.

• Ben Orlin, from Math With Bad Drawings, explains that when it comes to calculating area, everything is rectangles.

• Richard Harker shows how to create a dynamic 12 month rolling column chart, from horizontal data.

Excel Announcements

Here are some upcoming events, courses, recently published books, and other new items, related to Excel.

Excel Summit

• Amsterdam Excel Summit, April 13-15, 2015. Mark your calendar for April 13-15, so you can attend this amazing Excel event. Last year’s summit was an outstanding success, and this year should be even better! You can click here to register.

Share Your Events and Articles

If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please let me know. Thanks!

Last week, we saw a preview of Tableau’s Elastic app for spreadsheets. This week, you can see another beta add-in – BigPicture, from Palisade. It looks like Visio combined with Excel’s built-in drawing tools and SmartArt graphics.

Currently, you can download a free copy of the beta, to try it out (Windows only, Excel 2007 or later).

Watch this short video, to see how it works — the demo starts at the 1:30 mark.

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150309”

Spreadsheets are already fun, but Tableau wants to make them even more exciting, with its newest smartphone app, Elastic. In this video, Tableau’s VP of Mobile & Strategic Growth, Dave Story, opens a spreadsheet file (csv format) from his inbox, and shows how Elastic works.

I don’t see any information about the expected release date or pricing.

Continue reading “Excel Roundup 20150302”