Moved to the Excel Twitters archive:
Excel Twitters 20081227

Merry Christmas! Posting will be very light over the next week and a half (just the Excel Twitter posts), and will be back to normal on January 5th.
Thanks for reading the Contextures Blog and I look forward to sharing tips with you in 2009, and getting your much appreciated feedback.

Well, it’s Christmas Eve, and you’re probably too busy to read a long blog post today. So, here’s a quick tip that I discovered this week.
I use Firefox as my browser, and when I need a new tab, I right-click in the tab area, then click on New Tab.

Now, I realize that isn’t a terrible [...]

On my website there are sample Excel files, many of which use event programming to make things happen. Typing something in a cell, selecting a different cell, activating a worksheet, and many other actions, are Events. Add a bit of code in the background, and things can happen automatically if an event occurs. No need [...]

Do you have Access databases open throughout the workday, with people entering and editing data? In Access, data is saved automatically as you work, but it’s a good precaution to have a backup of the entire file, so you can recover if something goes wrong.
To make backups easy to manage, Jan Karel Pieterse has [...]

Christmas is coming, and people are still tweeting about Excel – at home, at work, and at school. I’ve had a busy week, but no, that wasn’t me sobbing into my pivot table. And which functions would you use at a bachelor party? Never mind, I’d rather not know!
If you still wonder what [...]

I'm the technical reviewer for Pro Excel Financial Modeling: Building Models for Technology Startups, by Tom Sawyer, which will be published in April 2009.
Here's how Tom describes the book:
"This is a great opportunity for me to summarize and share fifteen years of experience helping startup and early stage companies move from concept to operational status. [...]

Other causes have wristbands, so why not clean coding? Show your support for clean code by wearing a green wristband, that you can get by making a $10 donation to Families at the Dump.
It might be useful some days, to snap a wristband, and wake yourself up when your coding starts to go off track. [...]

In an Excel file with lots of worksheets, how do you help users navigate through the workbook? Here are a few of the methods I've used. I'm sure you've found your own creative ways to deal with the problem, and I'd be interested in hearing about them.
Create a Workbook Menu
You can use programming to create [...]

A couple of years ago, a client sent me an invitation to LinkedIn, a business connection website. To be polite, I joined, but never visited the site again, and didn't make any further connections.
A few months ago, I looked at LinkedIn again. I can't remember why -- maybe someone else invited me to connect, or [...]