How can you make it easy for people to enter and edit data in Excel, but keep them away from the data storage worksheet?
Last year, I posted a Worksheet Data Entry Form in Excel, where users could enter and view Excel data. It was based on a worksheet data entry form that Dave Peterson [...]

You can use Excel VBA to show messages to someone who’s using your workbook. This messages lets the user know that a customer name must be selected, and there’s an OK button to click after reading the message. (No one would ever click the OK button without reading the message, would they?)

But sometimes you [...]

At a client’s office last week, I was selecting a pricing option from a data validation drop down list. The worksheet was zoomed to 75%, so we could see more of the data, and the person watching over my shoulder asked, “How can you even read that?”
Good question. Sometimes the font in a data [...]

Congratulations to Alex Kerin, whose name I selected in the random draw for the Excelerator Quiz giveaway. Here’s his name at the top of the list, after I used the RAND function, and sorted the Rand column in ascending order.

Alex’s prize is a 23” monitor, plus a keyboard and mouse, courtesy of the PowerPivot team. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

What will you do better in Excel next year? Do you have any Excel bad habits that you’ll break? Are there any Excel skill areas that you’ll improve?
Based on the questions that I see in the Excel newsgroups and forums, lots of people could resolve to do one or more of these things:

Save your [...]

A bit of Excel programming can help us save some time and paper. Our goal is to stop people from printing an order form if they forgot to enter a customer name.
Last week, you created a macro to show a message if the customer name was missing in an order form. Today, you’ll make a [...]

Keeping Excel users on the right path is a big job, but somebody’s got to do it! Last week we created an Excel message box in an order form, to remind users to select a customer name.

However, we don’t want the message to appear in every order form – it should only show if the [...]

Unfortunately, no one has found a way to zap users with a mild shock from the keyboard, so we have to rely on messages to help people do the right things in Excel.
You can create messages without Excel VBA. For example, you can add a comment to a cell,

or use a data validation input message.

To [...]