Adding the Camera tool to your Toolbar

1. Right-click on the Excel toolbar / select Customize
2. Select the Command tab
3. Select the Tools category
4. Scroll to the bottom of the available tools, the Camera tool is 10 or so from the bottom. Select it and drag it to your desired spot on your toolbar

Using the Excel Camera tool

1. Select the Cells that you want to feature in your vignette window
2. Click the Camera button, you get Cross hairs
3. Select any sheet in your work book and draw the vignette box where you want to display it.

Now, whatever you do to the original cells will show an exact replica in your vignette window. You can resize the window by clicking on it and dragging the corners. You can also format it by right-clicking on the box and selecting Format Picture. In Excel 2007, you can also rotate the box. In Excel 2000, this is disabled.

One drawback (and perhaps fatally so) is that it is a one-way street from the Original cells to the vignette. You can’t update the cells in the vignette directly, all changes have to be made in the original.

Let us know if you’ve found a use for this nifty little feature.

1. Format the cells you want to show your meters in as Arial, 8 pt to give it a tight look.
2. Here’s a screen shot of some data and the formula:
3. Copy the formula down through you data list, and voila! You have a nice little bar chart.

The magic is in the REPT, which takes 2 arguments: 1) what to repeat, 2) how many times. =REPT(“X”, 5) yields: XXXXX

Simple, yet effective.

As with any Excel workbooks that you download from the web…don’t enable the macros until you’re 100% sure they are safe. This book shouldn’t have any macros, so Excel shouldn’t even ask if you want to enable them. Surf safe!!!!

This is a “simple” example. Excel powerusers should be able to reverse engineer it without too much trouble. If I can find the tutorial on the web, I’ll link it here.

Here is an example excel spreadsheet: Excel Scrolling Graph demo. I’ve zipped the spreadsheet and also made sure that it doesn’t contain any macros. You probably know this, but you should never enable macros (VBA) in workbooks that you download from the web unless you 100% trust your source. This trick doesn’t use macros or VBA, so if you get Excel asking you to enable them, don’t!

Here is a very detailed article explaning of how to make scrolling chart magic!

There must be over 100 functions in this add-in, here’s a few of the categories:

• sheet manipulations – copy, create (multiple sheets using highlighted cells as the names), deletes, etc, etc
• data manipulations – apply formulas in mass, convert text to numbers and vice versa, tons of stuff
• Text formatting
• Range manipulations
• Mass cell selections
• Printing
• many many many more … you have to see this to appreciate

Here’s their download page.

1. Highlight the cells you want to flip the orientation on
2. Ctrl-C to copy (or copy button…whatever you like)
3. Click Edit/Paste Special (might have to expand your Edit menu if you don’t see it)
4. Check the Transpose check box in the bottom right and click OK

You can do multiple columns/rows at the same time as well.

The Paste Special menu is tremendously useful, lots to explore there.