Excel 2020: Use the Windows Magnifier »
November 30, 2020
Someone always asks how to use Windows Magnifier on my live Power Excel seminars, so I will write up the key steps.
Excel 2020: Surveys & Forms in Excel »
November 26, 2020
I often start my live Excel seminars off by asking you to point your cell phone camera at a giant bar code I have projected on the screen. That QR code leads to a three-question survey. Answers automatically flow into my Excel worksheet and those answers get used in the afternoon demo of 3D Maps.
Excel 2020: Format as a Façade »
November 25, 2020
Excel is amazing at storing one number and presenting another number. Choose any cell and select Currency format. Excel adds a dollar sign and a comma and presents the number, rounded to two decimal places.
November 23, 2020
Excel 2013 added a new data-cleansing tool called Flash Fill.
Excel 2020: Perform Sentiment Analysis in Excel »
November 19, 2020
It is easy to quantify survey data when it is multiple choice: You use a pivot table to figure out the percentage for each answer. But what about free-form text answers? These are hard to process if you have hundreds or thousands of them.
Excel 2020: The Forecast Sheet Can Handle Some Seasonality »
November 18, 2020
Before Excel 2016, Excel offered a few forecasting tools that did not fit in every situation. If your sales data included some seasonality, the old forecasting tools would do a bad job.
Excel 2020: Build a Pivot Table on a Map Using 3D Maps »
November 16, 2020
3D Maps (née Power Map) is available in the Office 365 versions of Excel 2013 and all versions of Excel 2016. Using 3D Maps, you can build a pivot table on a map. You can fly through your data and animate the data over time.
Excel 2020: Render Excel Data on an iPad Dashboard Using Power BI »
November 12, 2020
Power BI provides a new way of creating interactive modern dashboards using data from Excel.
Excel 2020: Clean Data with Power Query »
November 11, 2020
Power Query is built in to Windows versions of Office 365, Excel 2016, Excel 2019 and is available as a free download in Windows versions of Excel 2010 and Excel 2013. The tool is designed to extract, transform, and load data into Excel from a variety of sources.
Excel 2020: Improve Your Macro Recording »
November 9, 2020
I loved the 1985 version of the Macro Recorder in Lotus 1-2-3. The code was hard to understand, but it worked. There are some defaults in the Excel Macro Recorder that cause misery for anyone trying to record macros. Here are three tips to make the macro experience possibly better.
Excel 2020: Find Optimal Solutions with Solver »
November 5, 2020
Excel was not the first spreadsheet program. Lotus 1-2-3 was not the first spreadsheet program. The first spreadsheet program was VisiCalc in 1979. Developed by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, VisiCalc was published by Dan Fylstra. Today, Dan runs Frontline Systems. His company wrote the Solver used in Excel. Frontline Systems has also developed a whole suite of analytics software that works with Excel.
Excel 2020: Create a Data Table from a Blank Cell »
November 4, 2020
Simon Benninga tells a story of a game called Penny Pitching. You and another student would each flip a penny. If you get one head and one tail, you win the penny. If the coins match (heads/heads or tails/tails), the other student gets the penny.