Call for Help Returns to the USA

Here is the story...a long time ago in a city by the Bay, the TechTV channel used to air two great shows every weekday. These shows had a loyal following - the Screen Savers and Call for Help. I was lucky to make two appearances on Call for Help from San Francisco. The show was very very popular - traffic at the site skyrocketed from a six minute appearance on Call for Help.

But then, the TechTV network was bought out by the Game Network in Los Angeles and renamed G4TechTV. Programming focuses on video games and Call for Help was cancelled.

Well, Call for Help came back in 2004, but it was a new version produced in Toronto. Leo Laporte is the host, but co-hosts Kat and Roger would be replaced by Amber and Andy. To date, over 195 episodes of the Canadian version of Call for Help have been produced in Toronto. The show is shown 3 times a day on TechTV in Canada. It is shown 3 times a day in Australia. But viewers in the U.S. had to try to download rogue episodes from bitttorrent.

I am a short plane ride from Toronto, so I have been appearing twice a month on the new Call for Help. Out of their 195 episodes, MrExcel has appeared on 24 of them.

Finally, and with little fanfare, the Los Angeles version of G4TechTV bought the rights to Call For Help. The first episode aired on Monday, August 29th, 2005. It is shown once a day, at 11AM Eastern, 8 AM Pacific. They air a couple of repeats on Saturday at 9AM and 10AM Eastern.

If you are a fan of the old show or a fan of ScreenSavers, you will enjoy this show. My inside take: Leo is stilll Leo. Amber is a more techically savvy version of Kat. Andy is far more excited than Roger. Kevin Rose makes frequent guest appearances. From the first few bars of the theme song, you will feel right at home.

If you never watched the old show, you should check it out. They talk about hot trends in computers and technology. They don't talk over your head. It is the cool place to be in the know.

You can find G4TechTV on your satelite system or on the digital tier of your cable system. Set up your TiVo to record a few episodes of the show and you will be hooked.

Pareto Analysis Using Pivot Tables

On today's episode of Call forHelp, I will show you how to use pivot tables to do a pareto analysis of manufacturing defect data. Your defect database may have 10,000+ rows of problems, but what do you do with that information?

Using a pivot table, you can start to figure out which manufacturing cells are the biggest problems and then drill down to find out if your problems are one one certain manufacturing line or if they started when someone left on vacation.

Read the complete details here: http://www.mrexcel.com/tip098.shtml

Pivot Table Tricks

Pivot Tables are my favorite feature in Excel. There is nothing more powerful than turning 60,000 rows of transaction data into a summary report with 4 mouse clicks.

In the episode of Call for Help broadcast today, I show two cool features of pivot tables.

1) A common problem in Excel is how to get a unique list of values from a dataset. For example, a list of all the customers who purchased something in the last year. This task usually involves the incredibly complex Data - Filter - Advanced Filter. However, in newer versions of Excel, you can use a pivot table to quickly get a unique list. The show notes will show you how.

2) When you create a pivot table, the default is to add the numbers in the data area of the chart. However, if you are summarizing several products for 12 months, even that summary view is a sea of numbers that will drive many managers crazy. Hidden behind the Options button in the Pivot Table Field dialog is a powerful set of options that allow you to present the resulting table as a percentage of totals, percentage of row, percentage of column and more.

For complete details, visit http://www.mrexcel.com/tip099.shtml.

Comparing Lists in Excel

Comparing Lists in Excel -
Many people try to use Excel as a database. One of the common tasks in a database is joining tables so that you can get a field from one list (i.e. the sales rep name associated with a sales rep number) and add it to another list. To match lists in Excel, you need to use VLOOKUP functions. I recently discussed the ins and outs of using VLOOKUP on TechTV's Call for Help. For details on using VLOOKUP, read Comparing Lists in Excel.