From the category archives:

Just Excel

Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 3

by Charley Kyd on October 24, 2009

I just received a dashboard report that I also need to discuss. So for the next few weeks I’ll turn into a spreadsheet critic.

Splattered Data

Imagine dropping a can of paint onto a parking lot from a 50-story building. Every car in the lot would be splattered. Randy’s workbook does the same thing with its data. So do many other workbooks I’ve seen. [click to continue...]

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Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 2

by Charley Kyd on October 5, 2009

Bad spreadsheet designs can hurt your career. I’ve seen it happen.

So in Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 1, I began to discuss problems in a workbook sent to me by an Excel user I call Randy. I hope this will help you to find and fix similar problems in your own workbooks.

Range Names

Randy’s workbook has more than a dozen worksheets, [click to continue...]

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Don’t Let Bad Spreadsheet Design Hurt Your Career, Part 1

by Charley Kyd on October 3, 2009

Responding to A Free Offer to Help Excel Users Improve Your Job Prospects, a reader sent me a workbook this morning. I’m glad he sent it, even though it contains no dashboards. This is because it illustrates many bad practices I’ve seen in Excel reports over the years.

I’ll call my visitor Randy.

Assuming that he created the workbook himself, Randy certainly seems to know his profession. And he did several things in his workbook that I like. But on balance, he’s made many common design mistakes that overshadow his professional skills. [click to continue...]

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How to Format Dates in X Axes of Mini-Charts in Excel Reports

October 1, 2009

When most Excel users create charts, they make them way too large. For many reasons, using mini-charts is much easier to read.
To illustrate, this Excel dashboard report contains 28 charts:

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Excel 2010 User Interface: “Is there any chance it will improve?”

September 24, 2009

Several Excel users have sent me messages this week to ask about the user interface for Excel 2010. They all wanted to know whether Excel will return to menus and custom toolbars, or offer a Classic Interface option.

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How to delete blank or unneeded rows in your worksheet, Method 1

September 18, 2009

When you bring data from another source into an Excel worksheet, the data often includes rows that you’ll want to delete. Often, you’ll want to delete blank rows. At other times, you’ll want to delete rows with irrelevant data. I frequently use two quick and easy methods that solve this problem nearly every time.
For both [...]

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How to delete blank or unneeded rows in your worksheet, Method 2

September 18, 2009

Data copied from a web site or imported from a variety of sources often include irrelevant rows of data.
For example, the only way to get data from some sources is to print the data as a file — complete with report headers, footers, subtotals, and so on — then open the file in Excel. You [...]

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You Usually Don’t Need to Select an Object in Excel VBA

September 11, 2009

An Excel VBA user asked in a forum recently how to select a sheet in VBA when the sheet name is stored as a variable. The odds are about 95% that he didn’t need to select the worksheet in the first place.
To illustrate, I turned on my macro recorder, selected cell D9, and entered “x” [...]

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Quickly Find a Worksheet in an Excel Workbook With Many Sheets

September 10, 2009

I’m not opposed to using VBA. I think it’s great fun and it can be very useful. But in a business setting, if VBA need not be used, it needs not to be used.
Today, for example, someone asked an Excel forum how to write a VBA macro that would list all the sheets in a [...]

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How to Change Text to Columns When You Copy and Paste in Excel

September 8, 2009

Today I needed to copy a bunch of numeric tables from a pdf file into Excel.
When I pasted the first table, all the data was pasted into column A, with a space between each number. That was no problem. I just selected the column of data and then used the following command…

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