Using “Transparent” option in SSRS, and prevent the ‘Not a Valid BackgroundColor’ Error
In SSRS, if you’re building an expression to manage, for example, the background colour of a cell / shape, it’s easy to fall into the ‘Transparent Trap’ When building an expression, it’s easy to use the expression builder to add constants and built-in values. This is particularly true of the colour pallet, given you
Insert an Excel Spreadsheet into a Word or Powerpoint Documents [2010,2013]
Can you believe that with all the articles I’ve written to this site, I’ve yet to do one specific to Word? Which is ironic, given I write and publish most of the articles from Word.
There is of course a logical reason for that – it’s just not a tool I use as much as other applications.
And, you’ll be comforted to know, this article isn’t a complete departure from my more frequent Excel related articles!
(I’ve written the article based on using Word, but the exact same approach is valid for Powerpoint as well)
Embedding Excel worksheets in Word:<
Format or Remove Borders from a Slicer or Timeline in Excel
Changing the formatting, or removing completely, the borders from Excel Slicers and Timelines isn’t obvious – read on to find out how
Concatenating Strings in Teradata – And What to Watch Out for with Fixed Length Fields
Concatenating Strings in Teradata is fairly straightforward, but there are a few things you need to watch out for.
Setting up Outlook & Lync on a Personal Computer
If your companies IT policy allows it, you may wish to setup your corporate Exchange account on your personal computer / laptop copy of Outlook. You can then take it one step further, if you so wish, and configure Lync on the back of this. Every company has a different setup, so some settings
Using SUMPRODUCT to create a Conditional Weighted Average in Excel
Follow this article to learn how to use this resourceful function to create a Conditional Weighted Average in Excel
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
Using RANK(), and ROW_NUMBER to Rank a field without ‘skipping’ numbers in SQL Server & Teradata
In this post, I want to cover off a little bit of RANK() usage in SQL, but then focus on how to use ranking to get a unique rank number for each row. I will cover both SQL Server and Teradata. RANK() is pretty simple to use, and works pretty much the same way in
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 /
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
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