Electronic Gradebook for Your Classroom

On today's episode of Call for Help, I show some techniques from the Excel for Teachers book. Learn how to create an electronic gradebook to track grades in your classroom. There are many tricks in this episode, including:

• Vertical Headings
• Absolute References
• VLOOKUP to convert percentages to letter grades

Read more here.

Black Friday

MrExcel.com was launched on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1998. This marks our 8th year anniversary. I want to thank all of the regulars for continuing to support the site.

I survived another black Friday early morning shopping trip.

Staples was my store of choice - I had my eye on their $149 off-brand GPS unit, a ridiculously low-priced Samsung laser printer, a 19" LCD monitor and a new office chair. The Staples parking lot was full at 6AM. The few GPS units and Samsung printers were snatched up within seconds, but I did manage to get the 19" LCD monitor and the office chair, as well as a 1GB USB drive and a new SD card for the digital camera.

It is probably just as well that the off-brand GPS was out of stock. Whenever I travel, I pony up the $10 to Thrifty to rent the Garmin GPS unit. The Thrifty locations have one of the C-series units, and these run circles around the GPS built in to my wife's Escape Hybrid. I've gotten used to the easy on-screen controls of the Garmin, and I would probably not be happy with the off-brand unit. I'll have to add the Garmin C340 to my shopping list.

Although I enjoy the thrill of the DoorBuster specials - This is the first year that I thought of offering any here at MrExcel.com. For the first time, you can check out some door buster specials at http://www.mrexcel.com/doorbustersale.html. The advantage is that you can grab these door buster specials without going out in the cold, and I guarantee that we won't run out of stock on any of those books. I'll leave the prices up until 9AM in California, so you have four more hours to check them out.

SWIPE Store in Toronto

I was in Toronto shooting Call for Help. There were a couple of book orders from Toronto, so I thought I could hand deliver those and also stop in to see the folks at InvestInTech, makers of the really cool PDF-to-Excel utility.

As I was walking down Richmond, about two blocks west of Spadina, I saw an amazing storefront called SWIPE. David Michaelides has been running a store dedicated to books about Design and visual information for 19 years. This is an incredible store - books about branding, advertising, graphic design, web design. I browsed his Charting section to get some ideas for my upcoming QUE book on Charting. If David doesn't have a book, he knows about the book.

High up in the rafters, near the cash register, you will see a pair of original 1984 Macintosh computers. Now - generally, numbers guys and design guys don't have a lot in common. However, graphic design really took off with the Mac, and Excel 1.0 debuted in 1985 for the Mac - so we had a common connection.

If you ever find yourself in Toronto, take an half hour to stop by and browse this amazing store.

Office 2007 goes live!

If you have an MSDN subscription, the Office 2007 final version went live today around 5PM EST. I've downloaded it and it seems very stable. If you've been using the beta, there are not many changes from the B2TR version.

Solve Sudoku with Excel

In today's episode of Call for Help, I show a variety of spreadsheet applications that can be used to help you solve Sudoku puzzles with Excel.

Sudoku is the number puzzle craze where you have to arrange the digits 1-9 in a 9x9 grid. Each digit can only appears once in any given row, column, or 3x3 subgrid.

Several MrExcel.com readers have submitted free tools that can be used to either solve your puzzle, or give you tips to solving the puzzle.

Read more here.