An Excel workbook certainly isn’t Fort Knox, and the information you store there isn’t too secure. If someone opens your Excel workbook, and is determined to see everything in there, they’ll probably be able to.
However, if your goal is simply to make a workbook easier for people to use, you can hide some of [...]

Let’s call this installment, “The Mysterious Case of the Vanishing Parts.” (Read carefully — that’s paRts, not paNts.)
And before I begin this sad story, remember to add your Excel question in the comments for Friday’s Excelerators Quiz post, so you have the chance to win a shiny new monitor.
Strange Formatting
Last Friday, I was working on [...]

Last Friday, January 8th, would have been Elvis Presley’s 75th birthday. Sadly, he died in 1977, so he never had a chance to work with Microsoft Excel. A Twitter challenge on the weekend was to rename some of Elvis’ hit songs, using Excel references. Who says Twitter is just a waste of time?
One of my [...]

Happy New Year! All the best in 2010, and I hope you’re looking forward to the release of Office 2010.
I thought about creating some fireworks in Excel, then discovered that Andy Pope already made some, based on an xy scatter chart. Here’s a screen shot that shows one of the bursts. And there’s no noise, [...]

Merry Christmas! I hope you’re relaxing today, and spending time with friends and family.
Here’s an Excel Christmas tree for you to enjoy, if you have Excel 2007. The lights on the tree are created with conditional formatting icons, and will change colour if you press the F9 key, to recalculate the worksheet.
You can download the [...]

You have an Excel order form with a long list of products to select. After a customer enters quantities for the products they want to order, you want to print an invoice for the selected items.
Select the Products
Here’s the OrderForm sheet, where quantities have been entered for four of the products, in column E.

Formulas [...]

Naming Excel sheets – how hard can it be? Last month, we looked at sheet names, and saw the problems that were caused by using an apostrophe. This week, I found another sheet name problem.
Someone, let’s call him Mr. X, contacted me about one of my sample worksheets — Create New Sheets from Filtered List. [...]

For the past 82 years (approximately), I’ve used Excel almost every day. Along the way, I’ve learned a few tricks, and produced some sophisticated workbooks. One of the joys of Excel is that there’s always something new to learn.
This week, while working on a client’s files, I wanted to review some calculations in a price [...]

Have you read all the Excel horror stories and costume ideas in the Very Scary Fall Giveaway for Excel Nerds? There’s some truly frightening stuff there! The entry deadline is tomorrow at noon, Eastern Daylight Time, so get moving if you haven’t entered already.
My Horror Story
One of my Excel horror stories involves sheet names. I [...]

The Very Scary Fall Giveaway for Excel Nerds is going strong, with lots of frightening Excel horror stories and some scary costume ideas. Please take a few minutes to read the comments, and add your contribution.
In the annoying, but not scary category, I’ve been entering network paths in Excel, and they turn into hyperlinks when [...]