Excel’s Camera tool is a really cool, but relatively obscure tool that lets you create a window on your spreadsheet that shows a vignette of a block of cells. The screen clip shown here demonstrates it in action. The Camera tool is pretty well hidden, so the first trick is finding the button to add to your toolbar. Here’s how: (more…)
This nifty little Excel tip comes via LifeHacker.com, originally given by JuiceAnalytics. You can create a sweet little bar meter chart by using the REPT() function. REPT is short for repeat. Here’s how: (more…)
My friend Peter strikes again. This time, it’s a very cool take on the scatter chart. Using the Offset function in Excel, you can create a chart that gives you the stoplight dashboard effect. The math behind this is a bit tricky, but it’s all right there in the Excel formulas. Like the scrolling graph demo, this one doesn’t require any macros. I’ve included a demo file zipped up: Excel Stoplight Chart Demo
My friend Peter showed me a very cool method of creating a graph or chart that lets you scroll through the time periods (or your x-axis) using a scroll bar. It involves setting up a few defined ranges containing formulas and using a scroll bar to control the starting point of your x-axis. You configure your graph to use named ranges as the sources for your data series. These ranges contain formulas.
I stumbled across an awesome utility add-in for excel that will save you tons of time doing mundane little formulas and formattings to your data. The folks over at ASAP Utilities have created this wonderful tool and it’s completely free for the taking.
Just got a call today from an accountant wondering how to turn a column of data into a row. If you don’t know, you’ll love it…so simple:
