Today, we look at a basic need and take it a few steps further. The result is a mini app for randomizing meals. We won’t get into the dirty how-to of formulas. Instead, we’ll think through what’s needed to make something really work for a repeated...
WHY SO MUCH ATTENTION ON VALIDATION? Embarrassment is what got me thinking about Excel data validation and general data quality. Let me describe 2 situations from years ago when I first started working with data: #1 My boss regularly had me run reports, and he’d...
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...
This video demonstrates one use of data generator results as follow-up to an earlier blog entry, Taming Dataville. In the video below, you will see: Use of dummy data While waiting for someone to create a Master List, I moved ahead by using random fish species where...
This project has a lot of pieces and resulted in something fun and challenging for me but also something quite valuable for the client. A key piece in the success was an Excel User form. Here’s a photo of me in actual battle with the Exceltopus that we roused...
This was inspired by a friend who asked about automatically populating a range by dragging the formula–based on numbers at the top and along the left side of the range. It’s a bit of a logic puzzle in using relative/absolute cell references, and...
