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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Excel charts, seasonality, & analysis: Five lessons from the WSJ

September 23, 2009

In my tiny town on the Washington coast, I don’t get the Wall Street Journal until it arrives in our mail box about noon most weekdays. So at breakfast this morning I read an article in yesterday’s Journal, which offers some great advice for Excel users in business.
Don’t get me wrong. The article, New Light [...]

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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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A Free Offer to Help Excel Users Improve Your Job Prospects

September 10, 2009

I just heard from another Excel user who’s out of a job. This set me to thinking — again — about ways that I could help. Here are three issues that I’ve been wrestling with:
First, many Excel users with great professional knowledge are looking for work. But for many reasons, it’s difficult for business [...]

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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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Excel’s Advantages for Predictive Analytics

September 7, 2009

Predictive Analytics is one of 4 Technologies That Are Reshaping Business Intelligence, according to a recent article in Information Week.
“Predictive analytics,” the article said, “is a white-hot growth segment that got hotter with IBM’s $1.2 billion deal to buy SPSS, a company that uses algorithms and combinations of calculations to spot trends, risks, and [...]

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Set Up Range Names to Connect Reports to Excel Databases, Part 3

September 1, 2009

In Excel Bug Deletes Some External Range Names Automatically I discussed a bug that exists in Excel 2007 and in the beta of Excel 2010. Here’s the summary of that entry:
When Excel range names in a report workbook reference sheet-scoped names in a database workbook, if the report workbook is opened first and the database [...]

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