Add a Time Bar to your chart
Line charts are a great way of showing the trend of information over time. I often use them to show both the historic actual, but also the forward forecast. Sometimes, however, it’s not always clear looking at a chart where your ‘actual’ ends and your forecast begins. I like to add an indicator showing me Read More
Finding the Difference Between Two Dates in SQL
In this post, I’m going to talk about finding the difference between 2 dates in SQL. However, I’m going to cover it across multiple applications. The Problem Statement is simple: How many days are there between two dates? What we want is an integer value back of how many days there are. The solution will Read More
Using Excel Sparkline Charts
Sorry for yet another Excel post – what can I say? I like Excel! Another feature introduced with Excel 2010, is Sparklines / Spark Charts There are tiny charts that sit inside a cell, and used to show trend data for many areas at once. They’re simple to use, and helps visualize your trend data. Read More
Take Better Screen Shots in Office
Nice & easy one today, but useful none the less. Screenshots are a useful way of sharing something on our screens, especially with the plethora of different systems that different parts of the business may use that you won’t all have access to. We all know how to take a screen shot – and we Read More
Using Slicers to Make Your Excel Report More Dynamic
One of the many new features introduced in Excel 2010 were Slicers. Slicers sounds fancy, but just think of them as Filter Buttons. They sit on top of Pivot Tables to make it easier to filter your data, and is a great way of presenting your data to someone else, who perhaps wouldn’t notice / Read More
Using IFERROR to capture Formula Errors in Excel
Here is another useful Excel Function that was introduced with Excel 2007 that just, well, ‘makes sense’ If you’re designing spreadsheets with lots of formulas and lots of data, there will come a time where you need to error-trap some values, so as not to show #DIV/0 or #N/A for example. Whilst there are better Read More
Highlight the Largest Value on an Excel Chart
A bit of a follow up from the earlier post on highlighting negative values. This should work with all versions on Excel – though the options may be in slightly different places. This time, I want to highlight the measure with the single highest value. I’m going to use the same chart as before. So, I Read More
Highlight Negative Values on an Excel Chart
[Update: Be sure to check out the related article, Highlighting the Highest / Lowest Value on a Chart] If you work with charts frequently, you may sometimes want any negative numbers to be coloured differently to the rest of the chart Take this example, showing average temperatures for Prague We may want to highlight Jan Read More
File Security in MS Office Files
I wanted to do a a post on file security – particularly for Excel files, though much of it will apply to other Office files. There are a lot of misconceptions out there, and people thinking they’re securing their work / their company’s data, when they’re really not! I apologise in advance if it gets Read More
Using SUMIFS to test multiple criteria
One of my all-time favourite Excel functions has been SUMPRODUCT – it’s versatility was endless, but was especially useful for when you wanted to SUM up some data with multiple conditions, such as sales of Pencils in the East region, perhaps. Using SUMPRODUCT, we’d have written something like this… This works well, but as anyone who has Read More
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