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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Posted on 10 September 2008
A novice asked the master: ``In the east there is a great tree-structure that men call `Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying `Go, Hence!' or `Go, Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity be?"
The master replied: ...
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Posted on 09 September 2008
WSJ ran this graph that shows the probability of a person's dying through various causes. Topping the "death chart" are heart disease (1 in 5), cancer (1 in 7), stroke (1 in 24) and motor vehicle accident (1 in 84). The probability that one will die by drowning is 144 times than being killed by flooding.
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Posted on 09 September 2008
This chart, appearing in an article titled
Earth without humans by Alan Weisman shows the time it'll take for nature to reclaim earth if humans vanish from the face of the planet today. Within 50 years, environment makes rapid progress towards recovery, in a 1000 years most man made structures will be gone and CO2 levels would be back to pre-industrial age levels. Nuclear waste however would remain upto ...
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Posted on 07 September 2008
This appeared some time back in April-2008. What is interesting to note is that not only this chart is visually appealing but it does pack a lot of data. The color of the stacks shows the % of subprime mortgaes as a % of all mortgages in an area while the height of a stack shows subprimes mortgages foreclosed as a % of all subprime mortgages in that area. If ...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
I sometimes use connectors and autoshapes in excel to make flowcharts for my projects. A little refined touch and you can have them looking nealy like the ones made in Visio. I say *nearly* because although everything moves, reshapes and resizes properly, the connectors still bend at 90 degrees unlike the ones in Visio which curve smoothly.....but nonetheless a small price to pay especially if you don't have ready access ...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
On a recent trip.........
captured a masterpeice.......
...
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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 06 September 2008
....and that's partly what got
Barrett Lyon to create this beautiful map the internet by locating each
C Class network in it. I think this has great potential. For example and as Lyon mentions on his site, if you get a chance to look at two pictures of a geographical location before and after a disruptive event takes place(like an eartquake or a Tsunami), this can give ...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
In recent weeks Oil has moved down from $ 140 to $ 108. After reaching record highs, some experts now predict that oil will continue to decline and go back to normal. The trillion dollar question is WILL IT?
The price that we pay for oil today certainly seems high, especially when one compares them to what the prices have prevailed for the greater part of this century. Once the oil ...
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Posted on 06 September 2008
One of the easiest ways to add interactivity to your spreadsheets and dashboard is to use the data validation feature in excel. Data validation allows you specify a list of options that you want a cell to display as a drop-down.
You may want to download the sample sheet
here before we begin.
To being creating a dropdown for a particular cell, select the cell and click Data -> Validation. In ...
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Posted on 04 September 2008
Mathew Bloch, Lee Byron, Shan Carter and Amanda Cox at NY Times produced this amazing visual showing the performance of movies at the box office between 1986 and 2008. Though the choice of an stacked area chart does not allow the reader to pick the numbers right off the chart but it certainly does pack a lot of information. Also check out the cool search feature!!
The Ebb and Flow of ...
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Posted on 03 September 2008
These beautiful maps on
Wikipedia show the paths of all the storms in the past few decades. As you can see, these tropical storms are the most ferocious over the Pacific West. The entire region consisting of Japan, China and South East Asia frequently encounter these storm systems.
...
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