Contextures News 20150331
7 Ways to Count + more Excel tips
March 31, 2015
There are many ways to count things in Excel, and we'll take a look at 7 of them, and more, in this week's Excel news. Visit my Excel website for more tips, tutorials and videos, and check the index for past issues of this newsletter.
Note: For some products mentioned below, I earn a commission on sales. That helps support the free tutorials on my site.
1. This week's posts
In case you missed them, here are the articles that I posted recently:
Weekly collection of Excel tweets
2. Dashboard highlighting
Robert Mundigl shows how to highlight a specific item in several places, in an Excel dashboard. For example, make the data for Germany stand out in a line chart, map and bar chart, by colouring it blue.
3. Project management with Excel
In the Project Management Podcast, Doug Hong shares his tips for using Excel for project management tasks. Do you ever get formula fatigue, as Doug mentions?
4. Excel forums
Which Excel forums do you use, when you have an Excel question? Jeff Weir looks at some favourites, and the comments have great suggestions too. I still miss the old Microsoft newsgroups.
5. New DAX formulas
Chris Webb shows how to use CONCATENATX – one of the new DAX functions that you can use with Power Pivot in Excel 2016. For example, if you sold apples to 3 customers, it will show all 3 names, separated by commas – Fred, Chris, Joe.
6. Your name in an Excel book
Enter Jeff Weir's caption contest, to try to win a copy of his upcoming Excel book. Improve on his photo captions, and you might see your name and caption in his book.
7. Change chart background
Chandoo shows two ways to change the background color on a chart, depending on a cell value. One method used VBA and the other uses conditional formatting.
8. Video: Create a Gantt chart
After listening to the podcast about using Excel for project management, I remembered my video that shows how to create a Gantt chart in Excel. It's a quick and easy way to see the tasks for a small project.
9. Last minute discount
The Amsterdam Excel Summit will start in a couple of weeks (April 13-15), and organizer, Jan Karel Pieterse let me know that they are offering a last minute discount. You'll get a 200 Euro discount if you register now.
10. Fancy birthday cake
Last week, my granddaughter turned 5, and had a birthday party, with a fancy cake, that looks too pretty to eat! On top of the cake is Elsa, from her favourite movie, Frozen. Did you have fancy cakes at your birthday parties, or just a few candles on top, like I had?
That's it for this week! If you have any comments or questions, send me an email.
Debra Dalgleish
dsd@ contextures.com
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Last updated: January 25, 2020 4:24 PM