Microsoft obviously doesn’t like the Mac platform. In Excel 2008, there are some really terrible functionality-cuts that will disturb every professional Excel user. And will force you to use Office 2004 or the PC version with a virtual PC (Parallels in my case).
I’ll collect here my findings of the serious problems I’ve found, bit by bit. Read more…
Microsoft Excel’s styling capabilities have improved over the time. But there are still lackings on some areas. One thing I personally miss is the ability to attach styles to Pivot table items. For example you have in one table the sums of revenues and sums of quantities – and you wish the revenues to be formatted differently. Of course, you can manually change the formatting of each revenue cell, but this is not a very modern way to handle it – considering we use styles for such formatting tasks in MS Office and other programs nowadays.
I have a little tip for those of you who face the same problem – you can still attach different color to different Pivot table items. Read more…
It’s quite common that the calculation adds precise numbers which are formatted to be less precise. It might also happen that due to rounding, the formatted result seems mathematically incorrect on screen. Read more…
Here is one tip for improving the readability of larger data tables – use in-cell graphics. This is based on using ordinary characters as graphic elements. It is possible to repeat the characters using Excel REPT() function. Read more…
Excel has a very uncomfortable bug – if you create a Pivot table in Excel 2007, then it will be “readonly” in earlier versions. I.e you can’t apply any new filters or re-arrange data fields. The only picture you see is like a static snapshot of the moment when it was last saved in Excel 2007. Even saving in 2003 compatibility mode will not help. Somehow the creation algorithm of a Pivot table is different in Excel 2007.
What to do when you need to have a Pivot table which can be used for Excel 2003 and 2007 users at the same time? Read more…
Large Excel spreadsheets are very vulnerable to mistakes in formulas. To reduce the probability of errors, good organization and structuring of data is a must.
Subtotal() function is one of the features that can help you to organize the spreadsheets better and prevent messy calculation logics. Novice Excel users often use SUM() function in places where SUBTOTAL() would be more appropriate. For large tables this practice can produce unmanagable files and hard to find calculation errors. Read more…
What will you do, if you have an output from a Pivot table and you need to use it as a source for another pivot table? Or you simply have gaps in the table that you need to fill with information above (or some other side). Not knowing the right approach might leave you the only option to change the cells manually – which would be a terrible waste of time for larger tables. Read more…
Excel has built-in data tables and charts. There are situations when you have a large nicely formatted table and you just need to add there little diagrams to envision the trend. Regular charts are too uncomfortable to use, because you would have to give up all the formatting of the excisting data table and create everything anew in the chart. The solution is to use sparklines charts. Read more…
