Posted on 09 October 2008
Those who’ve worked with elaborate multi-worksheet dashboards would realize the usefulness of adding a customized menu option. Apart from other things, a customized menu option can be used to guide the user to specific portions of an excel spreadsheet. For example, if you have a long report consisting of multiple charts, pivots, images and data fields, you may want to spare the reader the effort of locating the most useful (or important) portions by creating a new menu option and ...
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Posted on 03 October 2008
USA Today came out with this graphic recently which compares the size of the recent bailout package with the other historical packages in the past. I tried my own version of this and came pretty close to achieving the same results in excel. "Close" because there would be errors since the size of the boxes may not accurately represent the number corresponding to it.
As Paulson said, "If you have ...
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Posted on 21 September 2008
One question that comes to everybody's mind when thinking of investing in a house is whether the investment will be worth it. Over the weekend I worked out a basic model that attempts to work out the financials in three different scenarios - buying a house and occupying it, buying and letting out and thirdly, not buying a house at all. Expectedly, we can see, that buying a house may turn ...
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Posted on 20 September 2008
Excel provides a way to convert the charts in an excel workbook to a webpage. To move your charts online, select the chart and use the Save as option to save the chart as a .mht/.mhtml web page. What's more, the charts on the web page are interactive....changing values in the worksheet reflect in the chart elements. A very useful, though a little cumbersome, way of publishing chart intensive dashboards, reports and ...
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Posted on 20 September 2008
Peter Rakos in his article in
Gamasutra shows how to create a 3D simulation in Excel. He uses the create polyline (Shapes.AddPolyline) function in excel to generate a set of triangles (2D). A paid of these triangles is used to generate one surface of a rotating cube. 12 such triangles are used to generate the entire cube (12 triangles = 6 surfaces = 1 cube). Before each iteration, the previous shapes are destroyed ...
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Posted on 14 September 2008
Creating interactive map charts in excel is one of the easiest things to do.....that is if you know how. I recently created this map chart showing the top 50 tropical storms to hit the Unitef States since 1900. As you move ahead in time from 1900 to 2005, the map shows the states that were hit by the storm, the damage caused, storm category and rank. It takes about 5 lines ...
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Posted on 11 September 2008
.....because they take up a lot of space to show just one data element. However, if you still want to go ahead, you may want to take a look at this. (Inspired by the speed gauge depicted on BusinessObjects, now a SAP company). You can download the file
here.
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Posted on 11 September 2008
I wrote this small program that tracks the movement of the mouse in excel. The program uses an image to return the mouse X,Y coordinates. The shape that follows the mouse changes its attributes as it passes through various points in space.
You can download the file
here.
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Posted on 06 September 2008
You can use the group and outline features in excel to create tree structures. On expanding each node the next branch becomes visible.
You can download the file
here.
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Posted on 01 September 2008
tvbythenumbers.com paints the "Jodran Effect". Micheal's dominance of the NBA from 1991 to 1994 sent TV viewerships soaring to new heights. He then tried his hands at baseball and came back in 1996 not only to halt the decline while he was away but take them to yet newer levels. The ratings have never been that high again. (The upper line shows Viewership during NBA finals. The lower line shows viewership ...
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Posted on 01 September 2008
Excel can be used to create neat little simulations for classroom traings. I remember a long time back, I had a tough time trying to understand how the strands of a DNA coil around each other. Well....I tired my hands at creating a rotating DNA strand using 3-D bubble charts.....stright 'n simple for the most part......the trick lies in making the base and linking pairs change their overlaps after rotating every ...
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Posted on 23 August 2008
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Just playing around and having fun. Pretty simple code but one that realy works. You can have a look at the file
here.
Image courtesy www.dialaphone.co.uk
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Posted on 23 August 2008
Update: You can download the
Sudoku Solver in Excel with brute force
here (latest version) here.
For the uninitiated, Sudoku is a grid of 9x9 cells where each cell can and must have a value from 1 to 9 such that no number must be repeated in a row, column or any of the 9 groups of 3x3 grids.
And not onto the circumstances behind this sudden urge to develop a sudoku solver. ...
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