by Charley Kyd on December 18, 2011
Have you ever griped about an Excel limitation and then suddenly realized there’s a simple solution? That just happened to me.
For a long time, I’ve wished that Excel would anti-alias large font sizes. Without anti-aliasing, Excel’s large fonts have jaggies, as this section of a large letter “B illustrates.
Fonts don’t need to be THIS large for the jaggies to be obvious. You often can see the jaggies when fonts are larger than 20 points or so. But the larger the font, the more obvious the jaggies become.
This morning, I was working on a new dashboard report, which uses a headline of 96 points; so it has bad jaggies. Then I had an idea, which you can see here:
[click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 16, 2011
This figure illustrates a great Excel question that a friend asked today.
His original question was, “In this table, how can I return the date where the lowest value occurs?”
More generally, however, he was asking how to look up a value in two dimensions. This is a different challenge than most Excel lookups, which are limited to a single row or column.
To keep the explanation as simple as possible, I began by [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 13, 2011
I talked recently with an Excel user who’s making a great living from Excel reports. Because many Excel users are looking for jobs, I thought someone else could use a similar idea.
The idea is based on one that I first heard about as a teenager.
My best friend’s father owned a car dealership. One day, my friend said that his father was [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 13, 2011
If you want to show tabular data in Excel dashboards, Excel’s Camera tool is the most useful tool you can have. However, Excel 2010 has a bug that appears to limit the usefulness of Camera tools.
(If you don’t know what the Camera tool is all about, I devote a chapter to it in Dashboard Reporting With Excel.)
Here’s the bug: When you print a page that includes the Camera object, Excel sometimes adds row and column titles to the image, so that it looks something like the following figure in your printed results:
Honestly, I don’t know what causes Excel to display these headings. But I do know how to stop them. This figure shows the problem: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 9, 2011
As a follow-up to the last two posts, I just thought of a way to compare performance to multiple Boolean (yes-no) conditions.
In an international company, for example, how can we visually interpret a chart of sales that could be affected by recessions in several major market areas?
Similarly, how could we visually evaluate the effects of several ad campaigns that often overlap?
This figure shows one way to do this:
This chart definitely gives us more information to think about. Notice that: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 8, 2011
When you look at a chart of long-term business performance, showing where recessions occurred often can help to explain the results…as this chart illustrates:
Here, Dell’s revenue fell considerably during the last two recessions. But Dell’s revenue problems pale in comparison to Caterpillar’s, as this chart shows: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on November 7, 2011
Most of the time, at least one of the major trading countries is in recession. The bottom row of this Excel figure summarizes this sad situation.
This figure has an important story to tell, whether or not your company trades internationally. Here’s why… [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 28, 2011
I’ve been working today on the Quick Start manual for KydWeb, which I still hope to introduce on Monday.
Originally, I explained how to write a formula that references a page at http://www.eia.gov to return historical data for the the average price of gasoline in US$.
But this evening, I made a great discovery. I stumbled across a site that offers historical prices for many commodities in many currencies. It only took me about two minutes to write formulas that returned prices in Euros for two yellow products, gold and bananas. So that’s what I’ll cover in the Quick Start Manual.
But because many Excel users would find the gasoline data useful, I’ll explain how to reference it here.
The US Energy Information Administration provides the monthly price of gasoline at this link. Here’s the top of their price-history table: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 22, 2011
This morning, I came across a political discussion in the Financial Modelling in Excel group at LinkedIn.com. The discussion was starting to generate more heat than light.
The discussion started with a link to this post at Business Insider: Here Are Four Charts That Explain What The Protesters Are Angry About…
One of the author’s charts showed that corporate profits are at an all-time high; another showed that wages as a percent of the economy are at an all-time low. “In other words,” he wrote, “corporate profits are at an all-time high, in part, because corporations are paying less of their revenue to employees than they ever have.”
There are many ways to respond to that conclusion, but I thought it would be useful to measure wages and profits on the same scale to see what I could learn.
Using KydWeb, I loaded data from the following FRB series into Excel: [click to continue…]
by Charley Kyd on October 21, 2011
When you’re planning for your company’s future, it would be great to have an accurate and current indication of how optimistic or pessimistic the public is about future economic performance.
The Conference Board, the University of Michigan, Rasmussen Reports, and others publish monthly surveys of consumer sentiment. Unfortunately, these surveys have at least two limitations from the perspective of many Excel users in business. First, they both charge a subscription fee for the data. And second, the data only is available monthly.
But there’s another way to learn what the public thinks about the economy, as shown here:
Here, the light blue jagged line shows actual index values, and the dark blue smooth line shows the general trend in thee values. I generated the data for the smoothed line using the KydWeb_Smooth function.
Here’s how this index works: [click to continue…]
