Contextures News 20151027

Combine Excel Data

October 27, 2015

Combine data, add pictures, better reports, 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.

Select Multiple Items

If you select an item from a data validation drop down list, it replaces any existing data in the cell. If you'd like to add more items to the cell, instead of replacing the current text, you can use a bit of programming to allow that.

You can download my sample file, to see how this works, and I've added new code, to prevent duplication when you try to type an item in the cell.

Pictures in Excel

This week, someone asked how to put a picture into a cell on a worksheet. He was creating a list of employees, and wanted to add a small photo of each person.

In Excel, you can paste a picture onto a worksheet, but it floats over the sheet – it's not really in a cell. That can cause problems if you sort the list, but you can use the REPT function, to keep pictures in the correct row.

Another option is adding a picture to a comment. It takes more effort to add pictures this way, but the comment stays with the cell. And if you don't need calculations in the list, just use Microsoft Word -- it even has a Sort command!

Excel Dashboards

Mynda Treacy is offering free one-hour Excel Dashboard webinars this week, so get the details, and sign up for a date and time that is convenient for you. The webinars won't be offered again for a few months, so don't miss them!

Excel Articles

Here are a couple of Excel articles I read recently, that you might find useful.

Combine Data -- Download the free sample chapter from Microsoft Excel 2016 Step by Step. It shows how to use workbooks as templates, link to data in other files, and consolidate multiple sets of data, and works in older versions of Excel too. (Level - Basic)

Better Reports -- Charley Kyd posted five ways to make your Excel reports incredibly popular with the managers at your company. One suggestion is to create small charts and tables for comparing key data. (Level - Intermediate)

More Excel Articles -- Find links to more articles in the latest Excel Weekly Roundup on my Contextures blog. And for a bit of spreadsheet humour, you can see what people are saying about Excel, in my weekly collection of tweets.

Ups and Downs

Last week, my grandson's Halloween Beanie Boo had a birthday, of course, we celebrated with a candle in a banana streusel muffin. Things weren't so happy a couple of days later, when we heard that our granddaughter had fractured her leg, after trying to jump to the bottom of the stairs. She's in good spirits, but won't be walking for a while. There's never a dull moment, when kids are around!

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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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