Did you enter the Excel 2010 Future of Productivity Giveaway, that ended at noon yesterday, Tuesday, June 8th? The giveaway prize was a copy of Microsoft Office 2010, a Flip video camera, and a Seagate 1TB hard drive.
Of course, I used Excel to select the winner, from all the valid comment entries. I typed [...]

Have you installed Office 2010 yet? Would you like to win a copy, along with a couple of other great prizes? [for USA residents only]
In this short video, Microsoft employees and customers talk about the benefits of Excel 2010, both for the users and the IT department. Watch carefully -- there will be a [...]

This summer I helped a client automate several Excel sales reports, comparing sales forecasts to actual sales, and last year’s results to this year’s. It’s a complicated process, pulling numbers from different systems, updating lookup tables, compiling the numbers, and creating reports by product, by customer and by sales rep. Before we automated the [...]

Thanks for participating! You’re an awesome bunch of Excel nerds. The entries in the “You might be an Excel nerd…” giveaway were very entertaining, and read more like my resume than a list of contest entries. Yep, I do some of those things, and I’ll bet you do too.
Thanks again to the generous [...]

Last week, John Walkenbach posted a list of basic skills for men, then basic skills for women, and finally, basic skills for dogs. That got me thinking – what’s on the list of basic skills for Excel users? If you use Excel at work, or list it on your résumé, what tasks should you be [...]

In Excel 2003, you can add a couple of buttons to the toolbar to make it easy to filter a table. For example, in the table below, the East region is selected. With one click of a button, and no programming, you can add an AutoFilter and filter the table to show only the East [...]

Recently, I’ve made some progress in clearing out my office, and organizing my files and bookshelves. This week, after I was stabbed by a push pin, while trying to dig out a paper clip, I realized that my desk drawer could use some improvement.

At some point, I had good intentions, because you can see the [...]

In Excel, if you divide 2 by 8, the result is 0.25. if you format the cell as a fraction, the cell might show 1/4 as the result.

What if you want to show the result as a ratio? How can you get the cell to show 1:4 instead of 1/4? There may be other [...]

To survive business ups and downs, become a Roman -- disciplined and willing to keep fighting. That's advice from The First-Time CEO's Recession Survival Guide, on TechCrunch, written by Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker.
Some of the tips in this article aren't relevant to my small business, but many of [...]

Last weekend a friend, aka Chauncey, who has some gardening knowledge, came over to help trim the trees and shrubs in the back yard.  About an hour later, much of the lawn was covered with branches, twigs and leaves. It took another couple of hours to stuff everything into yard waste bags, and bundle the [...]