Microsoft Excel

Trusted Locations

Posted by Theo Heselmans on May 17th, 2008

Don't you hate it when you have to tell your Excel users to 'trust' you and enable the macros every time they open one of your files: In Excel 2003 they started with something called 'Trusted Locatio

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How I got into: Excel

Posted by Theo Heselmans on February 13th, 2008

Around 1980 I played with my (and the) first spreadsheet called VisiCalc, on an Apple II. This was one great piece of software, finally showing the full potential of personal computers. Lotus then dev

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SP3 for MS Office 2003 kills WK3 support

Posted by Theo Heselmans on January 9th, 2008

A couple of weeks ago the Microsoft updater installed Service Pack 3 (SP3) for MS Office 2003 on my machine. Great, more bugs fixed. It appears that MS blocked some older file formats from being read

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Forms for Excel

Posted by Theo Heselmans on December 6th, 2007

I work with Excel lists a lot. Usually for 'Auto-Filtering' and/or for PivotTables. There is a very nice tool in Excel, which allows you to work with individual 'records' in a list. The first thing

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Converting Accented Characters

Posted by Theo Heselmans on November 24th, 2007

Yesterday I needed a function to remove all accents from the accented characters in a string. I googled a bit, but did not find a clean solution. I needed it for Excel, but supposed it might be useful

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Working with Multiple Sheets

Posted by Theo Heselmans on October 10th, 2007

I had to do a lot of Excel work lately (most of the time I do Notes development, so this is a welcome change). Some of it involved working with multiple sheets. Did you know, that you can easily jump

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Dynamic Ranges in Excel

Posted by Theo Heselmans on September 22nd, 2007

A Pivot Table is usually based on a 'list' of data. This datasource has a header and below them, you got the actual data. It happens often that the data is extended by entering new data lines at the b

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Operators in Excel: in casu :

Posted by Theo Heselmans on August 23rd, 2007

You all know that +, -, * and / are operators, and you use them extensively in Excel. There is one operator you also use regularly, but you might not be aware that it's also an operator. I'm talking a

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Grouping in Pivot Tables

Posted by Theo Heselmans on August 12th, 2007

One of the coolest features in Excel is Pivot Tables. You probably use them frequently, because of their ease of use, flexibility, and incredible speed. Still a lot of its powers remains hidden. I'm

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Snapshot-pictures in Excel

Posted by Theo Heselmans on August 6th, 2007

As of version 3 of Excel (we're now at version 12 !), a feature was introduced that's not only unappreciated, but hard to find too. It's called Camera. Customize your toolbar and add the little camer

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Connecting the Dots

Posted by Theo Heselmans on July 16th, 2007

Custom Excel formatting is a neat way of accomplishing rather fancy representations of values. A custom format can have of up to 4 sections (this is from the Excel help file): So, if you want to p

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Alternate colored rows in Excel

Posted by Theo Heselmans on July 12th, 2007

Alternate colored rows takes me back in history when I had to work with piles of pyjama-striped chain paper, that were spawned from big noisy lineprinters. People still like alternate rows, as it imp

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Defining Names with Formulas !?

Posted by Theo Heselmans on July 7th, 2007

Defining names in Excel is usually limited to ranges (1 cell is also a range). Names are easy to define, and make formulas easier to read (look at the VLOOKUP post I did a couple of weeks ago). But

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Match my Index !

Posted by Theo Heselmans on July 1st, 2007

Last week I talked about an Excel function called VLOOKUP. It's a nice enough function, but has 1 major flaw: it's pretty slow, and when you have to look-up several other column info for the same key,

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VLOOKUP: nice enough

Posted by Theo Heselmans on June 24th, 2007

Most people use the VLOOKUP function in Excel regularly. It's a nice enough function, as it does a look-up of a value on a table, and returns the corresponding value of another column of the same tab

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Notes Data to Excel: the fast way

Posted by Theo Heselmans on June 21st, 2007

I do a lot of Excel reporting using Notes data, lately. This is pretty easy stuff, because you just have to create an Excel object and put a value into a cell. Look at the following straightforward L

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