TechTV


TechTV

Every afternoon, you could tune in to watch Leo Laporte give computer advice on a great show: Call for Help. If you are familiar with Car Talk on NPR, this was similar; Excel Leo was on TV, not radio, and he was broadcasting five days a week instead of just Saturdays. Between the calls, Leo would have two guests per episode. I was the Excel guy on Call for Help, making 86 appearances. Leo would give me six minutes to demo something cool in Excel. At the end of my segment, he would hold up my book for the camera.

These pages are the show notes that I wrote up for each episode.

Way too many charts rely on the pie chart. In this segment, we will take a look at when you should use a pie chart and when you should not. Also, some cool tricks for sweeter pie charts.

Forensic auditors can use Excel to quickly wade through hundreds of thousands of records to find suspicious transactions. In this segment, we will take a look at some of those methods.

There are a variety of uses for Excel in the classroom. In this segment, we’ll show how teachers can use Excel for classroom management and as a tool for their students to use.

Excel 2007 introduces a new way to visualize your worksheet before you print it. See the actual white space, margins, headers, and footers right in the worksheet.

Excel 2007 provides dramatic improvements to the Filter function in Excel. You can quickly filter a list to find a specific customer, records from a certain month, or records highlighted in a certain color.

Office 2007 offers 84 new types of business diagrams. It is easy to build and customize the diagram with the SmartArt feature.

One of the annoying tasks in previous versions of Excel was finding a unique list of invoices, customers, or products in a data set. Today, we’ll look at the various methods, including a new method in Excel 2007.

Excel 2007 offers amazing new data visualization tools such as icon sets, data bars, and color scales. These are great for the manager who's eyes glaze over when presented with a table of numbers.

Sometimes you are working in a Word document and it would be much easier to use Excel for the next section of the document. Perhaps you need a table, a chart, or some quick formulas. Without leaving Word, you can easily replace the Word menus with Excel and use Excel for the next section of the document.

Creating an amortization table.

The key to making a number of innovative charts in Excel is to change the chart type of one or more of the chart series.

The chief complaint about Office 2007 is that Microsoft replaced the menu and toolbars with a new user interface called the Ribbon. In their arrogance, Microsoft refused to provide a classic mode. In this segment, we’ll review two products that bring back the classic menu

Say that you've inherited this workbook from a co-worker. You want to learn about formulas in the workbook.

Excel 2007 offers a new charting engine. This article introduces this new engine.

Pivot tables improve in Excel 2007. On today's episode of Call For Help, I will show off the differences, plus some improvements that are only available in Excel 2007.

Excel Chart Lies »

02/25/2007

I am certainly not suggesting that you use charts to lie! The charts shown on this episode will help you to spot when someone is not telling the truth with a chart.

In Excel 2003, Microsoft introduced List functionality (Ctrl+L). They've improved and replaced this in Excel 2007 with table functionality. Most spreadsheets contain data in a tabular format - headings across the top and each row containing a new record.

The retail version of Office 2007 will be available on January 30, 2007. Here are five must-know techniques for Excel 2007.