Contextures News 20150609

Better Excel charts and dashboards

June 09, 2015

Build a nested IF formula, improve your dashboards, work with dates, change a pivot table layout, 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. Contextures Posts

In case you missed them, here are the articles that I posted recently:

Use the keyboard, or right-click menus, to move fields in a pivot table layout without dragging (Level - Basic)

For a humorous peek at what other people are saying about spreadsheets, read the latest collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.

2. Excel in the Classroom

If math teacher Mohammed Ladak could only use one piece of software in his classroom, he would choose Excel. See a few examples of how he uses it in lessons.Level - Intermediate

3. Take Dashboard to Next Level

Watch a video presentation by Stephen Hughes, on Taking Dashboards to the Next Level, hosted by the Excel BI Virtual Chapter of the PASS BA Conference. The video is about an hour long, and the presentation starts at the 4:00 mark. Level - Intermediate/Advanced

4. Work With Dates

Doug Jenkins takes a detailed look at how Excel handles the display and entry of dates, and how they're affected by regional settings. Level - Basic/Intermediate

5. Setting Excel Options

Sumit Bansal shares a few tips for making it easier to work in your Excel files. It's easier to change settings for #3 and #6 on the Ribbon, and use that manual calculation setting with caution! Level - Basic

6. Build Nested IF Formulas

Glen Feechan breaks down the steps for building a nested IF formula on the worksheet. For more info, there are simple IF and nested IF examples on my IF function page. Level - Basic/Intermediate

7. Fix the Chart Gap

Ann K Emery shows how to make columns in a chart closer together. It's a simple step, but can make a big improvement in the chart's appearance. Level - Basic

8. Answer What If Questions

Mary Ann Richardson sets up a two-variable data table, to get the answer to a "What If" question, then adds conditional formatting, to highlight the top 10 and bottom 10 results.

You can see another example, and a one-variable data table, on my Contextures website. Level - Intermediate

9. Dad's Moustache

My daughter works for Movember Canada, and they're posting "My Dad's Moustache" pictures, in honour of Father's Day, on June 21st. One of the pictures they used is this old photo of Mr. D and our daughter, enjoying a book together. Love those cheeks!

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https://www.contextures.com/newsletter/excelnews2015/20150609ctx.html

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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