Posted on 04 March 2010
Anytime I write VBA code that runs for more than a split second, one of my worries remains that someone will ctrl + break it. You see, I am a very strong supporter of P.E.T.A. (People for Ethical Treatment of Algorithms) and believe that any code, no matter how long it takes (or in my case how badly written it is), must be allowed the dignity to complete. And for those who believe in killing poor little VBA code(s) with ...
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Posted on 22 February 2010
Heat maps are pretty versatile. They have been used for everything ranging from charting home prices to changes in the stock market.
(Average Listing Price for US states, week ending Feb 17, 2010. Source : www.trulia.com)
(SNP performance, Feb 19, 2010. Source : www.finviz.com/map.ashx)
Inspired by the last ball win over the South Africans yesterday night, I wondered if some of that action could be captured in ...
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Posted on 10 February 2010
Looks like I am not the only one suffering from browse fatigue. Excel guru
Dick Kusleika recently made the shift from Firefox to Chrome and he wasn't very impressed. I myself have been fiddling around with various browsers lately. Right before
my earlier computer gave up the ghost and I shifted on to the new one, I had been hell bent on squeezing out the last remaining ounce ...
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Posted on 03 February 2010
So how do you fit multiple scales on a single excel chart? No, we are not referring about the primary and secondary scales on an Excel chart here, we are talking about adding a customized scale for each category in the chart.
Take for example the receipts portion of the U.S. federal budget - a data set with multiple categories such as individual income, social security, excise, estate and other taxes & duties.
...
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Posted on 31 January 2010
So you have been toiling away on a spreadsheet that must reach the CEO's desk before the end of the day. Your boss has been after your life to get this done as fast as possible with his frantic phone calls and a rather sharp pitchfork that he uses on special occasions like these. A gazillion formulas, allocations and calculations later, with your body screaming for some coffee, you allow yourself a break. As you return to your desk with ...
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Posted on 28 January 2010
Table formulas were something that I discovered recently. Actually our reader m-b commented that he prefers to convert a range to a table and then employ table formulas instead of
named ranges. That got me curious enough to explore them further and here's what I learnt.
A Table in Excel
A table is a feature in Excel that makes it easier to format and analyze a set of data points in a spreadsheet. Tables were introduced in Excel 2007 as an ...
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Posted on 25 January 2010
Today's guest post is authored by Daniel Ferry, a longtime professional Excel developer and consultant (and a newbie blogger). A few months ago, I wrote a post on how one can
simulate multithreading in VBA using Excel. Daniel picked up a thread from there and commented that he had some good success in marshalling some of windows multithreaded subsystems from within VBA. In this article he describes his approach.
Multithreading VBA - Using VBScript
Try as we might to work around ...
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Posted on 21 January 2010
Named Ranges are probably one of the most useful features in Excel. Named ranges can add interactivity, make long formulas shorter and and if used properly, generally provide a clean mechanism to share information across the workbook. I remember being mighty impressed with
Peter Rakos 3D rotation model last year and spent a good amount of time trying to understand it. The VBA code is only a few lines with the major work being taken up by the ...
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Posted on 19 January 2010
So you thought you knew every goddam' Excel shortcut out there? Thought that you were the quickest draw around the office block. Not so fast sunny boy ... not so fast ! You've just ventured into the mean and vicious badlands of the Bison.
You have two choices - stop reading this here ...
... OR
... stay back and take up the challenge ....
So before I have your ego blown off, I will give you 7 chances to salvage it.
Excel Shortcut ...
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Posted on 12 January 2010
Here's a slightly dated chart from NY Times showing volatility on the Wall St across the century. The chart does commendable work in conveying information about a longish time series pretty effectively. I found some great chart design principles at work here that I could utilize for day to day charting needs.
(Click on image to open larger version. Click
here for the original version)
Here's a look at a few of those ...
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Posted on 10 January 2010
Sometime back I wrote a post on
making control charts using Excel. The chart was initially created in Excel 2003. The chart consisted of the plot values, the average line and upper & lower control limits. While the main data series was a line chart, the average, upper and lower control limits were plotted as dots of an X-Y and then were extended into lines using the horizontal error bars. Shown below is a sample.
...
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Posted on 08 January 2010
Its been one and a half year since I started this blog. For the first few months, I thought I was writing only to myself (I still sometimes do when I don't get too many comments for a couple of days at a stretch). But, things have been great lately.
The blog now receives a respectable number of visits a day and while that is good in itself, the better part is that ...
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Posted on 06 January 2010
A what!!! A Square Bubble Heatmap Chart !!! What has the Bison been eating lately. Frankly .. I don't really have a name for this chart. It is a bubble chart. The bubbles are square. And it's a heatmap. So I'll call it a Square Bubble Heatmap Chart or better still, S.B.H.C. for short 8-) .
The Basic Data Set For the Bubble Chart
Now let us assume for a moment that ...
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Posted on 01 January 2010
The IF function in VBA is one of the most frequently used of all statements. The IF function checks if the specified condition is being met or not. The IF function in VBA works in a slightly different manner from how it works in Excel. In Excel, the IF function does two things : It checks whether the given condition evaluates to TRUE or FALSE and then returns a value to use based on the evaluation i.e IF(condition, return_value_if_condition_true, ...
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Posted on 29 December 2009
Treemaps are an interesting way to look at data. Here is the first preview of the treemap add-in for excel. Being a demo, the number of data points are limited to 50.
Here the a demo file containing the
treemap add-in for Excel. (The demo treemap version is limited to a maximum of 50 rows and is meant for evaluation purpose only. The full version does not contain this restriction.)
...
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Posted on 28 December 2009
Last week my computer broke down. This time, unlike previous occasions, it just wouldn't resurrect itself. That rig was my first build and had been with me for the past eight years. It wasn't a thoroughbred, a humble Duron (AMD) at heart but it had its fair share of adventures. All those impromptu college parties, those last minute project reports, getting hauled around in a rug-shack, a thousand tweaks to squeeze the last remaining MHz out of the processor, even ...
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Posted on 25 December 2009
Data Validation feature in Excel allows the user to create a drop down list in Excel. The drop down list created using data validation allows the user to pick and choose a single value from the entire list and thus prevents entry of invalid values. The drop down list can be created by typing in a set of values, using a range of cells or by writing a formula in the data validation option box.
Create a Drop Down List ...
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Posted on 24 December 2009
Its been a few days since I posted. In case you were wondering what I was up to - yours truly was busy coding a program to create treemaps in Excel. Treemaps are interesting creatures. You can pack a few thousand data points in a single treemap and utilize just about the same space as any of the traditional charts. The term 'treemap', as we see it being used nowadays, actually refers to the inward growing members of the treemap ...
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Posted on 20 December 2009
The VBA Select Case Statement is an important construct in the VBA language. The Select Case statement in VBA allows the program to execute one set of statements out of many based on what a given expressions evaluates to. In today's post we will look at some basic and intermediate ways in which it can be used when writing VBA code.
Basic Form of the VBA Select Case Statement
[cc lang="vb"]
Select Case expression_to_test
Case expression_value_1 : Code to Execute When expression_to_test = expression_value_1
Case ...
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