Learning Excel By Building
Every day someone new is thrown into a data-driven/Excel situation and they don't know where to start. So, they flail, panic, curse, pray and beg, and either figure it out or they don't figure it out. I wondered, "what might a better introduction look like?" Teaching...
Beyond BI Tools: The Real Life Impact
One night I was up late, thinking about Excel, data and the many conversations around the different tools that we use to get our data to tell us something useful. But I was reminded of many years ago and why I have remained so passionate about data: it's the rewarding...
More Excel Videos in 2016
As we move forward in 2016 you will see a lot more video from me and fewer long-form blogposts. As 2015 closed there was a stretch where I'd uploaded 5 videos over 2 weeks. That level of production has never happened over the 5-ish years of this blog. One thing that...
Beware the Octopus Spreadsheet
So many spreadsheets require basic math, but poor layout makes a spreadsheet unnecessarily complicated and brittle. They don't need sophisticated dashboards, forecasts, statistical analysis, or connections to a database. They just need to perform basic tasks like:...
Intersection Operator and the Good Enough Solution
This video has several layers. The ultimate goal is to create a table of summaries from a dataset that has granular data. One layer is the creation of the named ranges. You'll see that I set up the named ranges and didn't remove the blank rows or do anything to clean...
Why Am I So Passionate About Data & Excel?
In this video I share my true motivation for working with Excel. The bottom line is: keep Doreen happy. This is reminder that whatever we do with Excel and data, it's all in service to something. There's more than tips and tricks. There are people who have to live...
Microsoft MVP Summit 2015: Reflections
Last week I participated in my first Microsoft MVP Summit and it was a great experience. Several thousand MVPs are invited--each Microsoft product has its own MVP program. Word. Xbox, SQL Server, PowerPoint, Project ... everythign! There are approximately 100 Excel...
Mo & the Bull Named Gnarly Data
My friend Mo works in the areas of branding and marketing. He text messaged me over the weekend, but I didn't see it until about 5 hours after he'd sent the message. He was asking if I had a second to go over some Excel stuff with him. By the time we did talk on the...
Excel, Rap, Music Education and Cole Mize
I was up at 1am today surfing YouTube and came across a How To Rap channel by ColeMizeStudios. Some of what I saw made me shout out loud because Cole Mize (pictured on the right) is a reminder that EVERYTHING IS DATA! Everything. Cole Mize brilliantly takes music and...
30 Years of Excel
This week Microsoft Excel celebrates its 30th birthday and there's a lot going on. Over at the Contextures blog, Excel MVP Debra Dalgleish sent out a general call for people to submit their early memories of Excel. This week she will be posting the stories. So, put...
Regular Data David vs. Big Data Goliath
The PASS Business Analytics Conference 2015 was April 20 to 22 and it was an honor to be a speaker, sharing knowledge and getting to know people in the Business Intelligence realm who are outside of Excel. PASS is primarily a SQL community but they recently started to...
Handling Overrides and Exceptions in Excel
As we develop tools in Excel, it's nice to be at a place where everything is automated. One change in a cell cascades through the spreadsheet and updates everything that's impacted by the single change. However, there are times when we need to override a calculation...