by Oz du Soleil | Apr 1, 2013 | Data Management
LEARN TO LOVE YOUR DATA DUMPS I am hearing more and more that people don’t know what’s in their data, what to ask of their data, especially “how do I get at what I do know I’m looking for?” Here’s a story: THE INFORMATION IS...
by Oz du Soleil | Feb 6, 2013 | Excel Geekdom, Spreadsheet Development, Spreadsheet Tidiness
Quick & dirty update! AWW WOW! Excel 2013 allows the addition of a timeline into Pivot Charts! (not included with Excel for Mac) Let’s say you have a lot of dates and want to see graphic summaries grouped by month or year. Before 2013, that called for a...
by Oz du Soleil | Jan 14, 2013 | Data Management, Excel Geekdom, Screencast, Tips
Tonight, I’m preparing to teach a workshop and need examples to show the students. Here’s your behind-the-scenes peek into using Excel to generate data to build useful examples. WHY GENERATE BOGUS DATA (AKA DUMMY DATA) SETS? Knowing how to generate random...
by Oz du Soleil | Sep 6, 2012 | Data Management, Spreadsheet Development, Tips
What Are Pivot Tables Used For? What Are Pivot Tables Good For? My last post described spreadsheet Pivot Tables and tonight I was talking with my good friend Patrick Richards. He commented that he wasn’t left with a clear sense of what a Pivot Table is....
by Oz du Soleil | Sep 4, 2012 | Data Integrity, Data Management, Excel Geekdom, Spreadsheet Tidiness
What Are Pivot Tables Used For? What Are Pivot Tables Good For? Many of you have heard of Pivot Tables and aren’t sure what they are. I’ll leave you to Google how to mechanically get one working but if you’re like me, teaching the mechanics...