The Content Aggregator Called Excel

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 ... Continue Reading

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Table Formula in Excel (Something I didn’t Know Till Yesterday)

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 ... Continue Reading

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Multithreaded VBA - An Approach To Processing Using VBScript

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 ... Continue Reading

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Named Range - A Few Quickies

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 ... Continue Reading

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So How Many Of These Excel Shortcuts Do You Know, Punk ?

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 ... Continue Reading

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Volatility Chart in Excel - Lessons in Chart Design From NY Times

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 ... Continue Reading

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