When faced with tough problems I react in one of three ways
For most problems, I choose 3rd reaction. Occasionally, I rely on 2nd option and very rarely the first one.
When faced with a tricky time sheet summary problem (as outlined above), after initial lethargy I wanted to solve it. Continue reading
Jo, my lovely wife quit her job as my partner in crime at Chandoo.org recently and took up a lucrative position at NZ govt. agency. The other day I asked her “how was your day?” when she got home. She smiled and said, “I learned my first Excel shortcut!”.
Guess what it is?
F4.
That is right. The mighty F4 key. You can use it to repeat any action.
Jo was using it to insert rows in her workbook. After inserting first row (using CTRL+ of course), she would press F4 to add more rows as needed. Continue reading
Hi friends & readers of Chandoo.org,
A quick announcement for you.
As you may know, I have opened enrollments for our 50 ways to analyze data course few days ago. The aim of this course is to make you an awesome analyst. This course teaches 50 powerful, relevant, practical and insightful analysis techniques in example driven methodology.
We will be closing the doors of this program at midnight, today – 11:59 PM, Pacific time, Wednesday, 17th of May, 2017.
I want to invite you to this program because I want you to be an awesome analyst.
Here is a simple but vital charting rule.
Start your bar (or column) charts from zero.
To illustrate why you should do this, let me share a personal example.
Over the weekend, the Jon Peltier visited Wellington. He is staying with Jeff (who occasionally guest blogs on Chandoo.org). On Sunday, we all decided to hike up a small mountain near my house for a leisurely family picnic.
While on the top of the mountain, Jo (my wife) took a few pics of us three Excel geeks. As we were standing on a sloping mountain face this is how the pictures look.
Looking at the picture on left, you would confidently say that I am way shorter than other two. But picture on right tells a different story. Continue reading
Hi friends & readers of Chandoo.org,
I am very happy to invite you to our newest online class, 50 ways to analyze your data. This program makes you an awesome analyst, training you on vital skills like data analysis, data science, visualization, modeling business problems and finding best solutions.
Please click here to know more about this program & enroll.
We are in the age of data. If you want an awesome career, then you must know how to harvest information from data. To find the stories hidden in your data, you need to follow a process like this:
This is where the 50 ways to analyze your data course helps. In this program, we analyze 50 familiar, important and diverse business situations using several of the above steps. Continue reading
Recently I was creating a pivot report with multiple items in row labels area. I had to show sub-totals, but only for one of the fields. Something like above.
How to show selective sub-totals in Pivot Tables Continue reading
Imagine you are head of human resources at Casual Contracting Co. Every month you hire a lot of temporary staff who spend 1-4 months with CCC before leaving. Sometimes you hire the same people again. Of late, you have noticed a strange process gap. You are paying same person two (or more) salaries.
This is because you are hiring a person for new temp role even before their current one ended. See above picture.
So how to avoid making such hiring boo-boos.
Simple, using Excel of course. Continue reading
Excel Tables have been around for a decade now (they are introduced in Excel 2007), and yet, very few people use them. They are versatile, easy and elegant. At Chandoo.org, we celebrate Tables all the time. If you have never used them, start with below tuts.
While tables are super helpful, they do come with some limitations. Today let’s examine one such unique problem and learn about an elegant solution. Continue reading
Imagine you run an office furniture company. You want to stop reordering two brands of furniture – Relaxer (a type of chair) and Boca Top (a type of table). You currently have 20,000 Relaxer chairs and 5,000 Boca Tops. These are valued at $200,000 and $100,000 respectively. When sold, they will yield $100,000 and $25,000 gross profit. You are hoping to sell them off in 2 or 3 years. You forecast that we can sell off these as per some yearly schedule.
You need to analyze this and prepare a cash flow model.
Let’s learn how to answer such open ended questions using various analysis techniques in Excel. Continue reading
It is Easter time, and that means time for another fun Easter Egg hunt in the spreadsheet. For the last 8 years (since 2009), I have been running Easter Egg hunt at Chandoo.org. This year too, I have prepared an exciting egg extraction enigma for you. Check it out.
Can you find all the 5 hidden cells in this workbook?
First step. Download this workbook. There are five worksheets, each containing one egg. You need to find the hidden cell in each worksheet. Continue reading
