Excel Weekly News from Contextures Sep 3, 2013

Enter multiple items in a cell + more Excel tips

In this week's Excel news, you'll see how to add multiple items in a cell, and other tips. Thank you for reading the Excel news!

 -  Debra ddalgleish@contextures.com

Excel Gantt Chart Template Giveaway

The two winner of last week's giveaway, for the Excel Dashboards and Reports book, are Jake and Jason M. Congratulations!

This week, you can enter the giveaway for a chance to win a copy of the Excel Gantt Chart Template, by Jon Wittwer at Vertex42. Four winners will be selected.

Go to my blog post, read the rules, and add your comment, to enter the draw for this add-in. The deadline is Wednesday, Sept. 4th, at 12 noon, Eastern time.

Click here to see the details, and to enter the giveaway: Excel Gantt Chart Template Giveaway

Prevent Subtotals from Appearing

When you put multiple fields in a pivot table's Rows or Columns area, items in the outer fields automatically get subtotals. The innermost field, like Category in the screen shot below, doesn't get subtotals.

You can turn this feature off for the entire pivot table, or turn subtotals on or off for a specific field.

Click here to see the details: Prevent Subtotals from Appearing

Enter Multiple Items in an Excel Cell

There is a tutorial on my website that shows how you can select multiple items from a cell's drop down list. Instead of overwriting the cell's value, new selections are added to the end of the cell's contents.

The old version of this technique only worked on data validation cells, but now you can name any cell, and use the revised code to enter multiple items in that cell. You won't have to fuss with the entry in the formula bar -- just type over the existing entry, and the new item is added to the end of the list.

Click here to see the details: Enter Multiple Items in an Excel Cell

More Excel Tips

Here are a few more Excel articles that I read this week, that you might find useful:

  1. If you've ever dreamed of creating art in Excel, the Think Maths website makes it easy. Just upload a small photo, and they'll send you an Excel workbook with each pixel in a separate cell. See a few other creative uses for Excel on Microsoft's Excel team blog.
  2. Ignore the birth year, to see who has an upcoming celebration. Chandoo shows how to sort a list of birthdays.
  3. For a humorous peek at what other people are saying about Excel, read this week's collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.
  4. If you use Excel VBA, Doug Jenkins compares Collections, Dictionaries and Arrays on his Newton Excel Bach blog, to see which is fastest.

Video: Sort a List in Custom Order

In the Sort dialog box, or on the Excel Ribbon, you can select a sort order, such as A to Z, or Largest to Smallest. In addition to these standard options, you can sort in a custom order, such as by month, or weekday, or a list of departments that you created. In this video, a column is sorted by weekday names, using the Excel Ribbon command.

Watch the steps for doing a custom sort in this video, or follow the written instructions, on the Excel Sorting page on my Contextures website.

Lazy Long Weekend

Officially, it's still summer, but the Labour Day weekend signals back to school time, here in Canada. We had a lazy long weekend, and enjoyed relaxing in the back yard. My granddaughter loves the little flowers on the clover plants, and gave me this little bouquet for the patio table.

I hope you enjoyed the holiday weekend too, and are off to a good start, if you're back in school now.

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