Posted on 08 October 2008
A waterfall chart is used to represent a set of figures when they all impact the same derived number. A waterfall chart helps to link the individual values to a whole. A profit and loss statement is a good example where the magnitude of each figure has an impact on a derived number (which happens to be Profit in this case).
A colleague of mine recently had a budgeting exercise assigned to him where he had to project the P&L figures ...
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Posted on 05 October 2008
Below is a list of how much the global markets have fallen in the past year. The highs and the lows may not coincide with the beginning and end of the one year period. Data for week ending 5-Oct-08.
S&P 500
52 week low: 1,098
52 week high: 1,576
Correction: 30%...
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Posted on 04 October 2008
The autorickshaw dropped me home. I was returning from a late night show having spent a few hundred bucks on a dinner and movie ticket. The meter read 11 rupees. I asked him if he had change for 50. He didn't. He offered to let go 1 and settle for 10.
Here I was. Probably earning 100 times that this guy was earning. There would be days that he would go hungry. And yet he was willing to happily let go ...
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Posted on 04 October 2008
I confess that I am a big fan of animated movies. They make me laugh. Here is a list of the cartoon characters that I find the most amusing.
Character: The roach
Movie : Wall-E
Why: Just look at the roach! PIXAR has taken care to ensure that he does everything that roaches are known to do and yet make you laugh. Just look at his antenna curled backwards. Even the body is sloped ...
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Posted on 04 October 2008
Below are my predictions for how the world is going to look like in 2020 :
1. Electric cars would form more than 75% of all cars on the roads in Europe and more than 60% in the US. However gasoline production remains at the same level and we continue to pollute more.
2. Man would have landed on Mars.
3. Voice commands become an integral feature of Windows. The keyboard will still be around but the mouse will be replaced by touchpads ...
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Posted on 04 October 2008
Real Estate can and does appreciate. And prices can drift downwards too. I would classify the factors that decide on these movements as being:
1) Local (Distance from central business district, prevailing living conditions in that area including offices, shopping malls, parks, entertainment centers, distance from major arterial roads, distance from landmarks such as airports, town halls etc.)
2) Regional or National (Growth rate of a country, Rate of unemployment, Rise in income levels, Rise in populations segment that can afford housing, ...
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Posted on 03 October 2008
The congress and the house have approved the $700 billion rescue plan. However for those who had a chance to read through the fine print, there was disappointment in store….there’s wasn’t any plan. The proposal itself is actually a lose aggregation of definitions and statements of intent aimed at keeping the homeowners in their houses. The document passed by the senate simply lays down the guidelines for providing the Secretary of the Treasury powers to use $700 billion from the ...
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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 23 September 2008
While working with multiple pivot tables, one often encounters a situation where multiple pivot tables are created with the same underlying set of data. In such cases, you may want to have the ability to simply select a value from a single drop-down and have all the pivot tables reflect that change.
A small piece of code can be used to achieve this. It uses the PivotTable.PivotFields().PivotItems attribute to check if the value selected ...
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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 14 September 2008
The study conducted by
ethority.com points out the difference in the choice of the social networking tool across geographies. While the Germans tend to prefer SchülerVZ, Japanese prefer mixi and Russians livejournal. Facebook seems to occupy the #1 or #2 in all the geographies studied. However it would be very interesting to see their evolution over a period of time. What is certain is that the present social networks ...
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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
Telegeography carried out a study of the global internet traffic. Some very informative charts are available on the site including this one. The US continues to be the hub of global traffic.
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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 10 September 2008
A programmer from a very large computer company went to a software conference and then returned to report to his manager, saying: ``What sort of programmers work for other companies? They behaved badly and were unconcerned with appearances. Their hair was long and unkempt and their clothes were wrinkled and old. They crashed our hospitality suite and they made rude noises during my presentation.''
The manager said: "I should have never sent ...
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