Let’s start with keyboard shortcuts. It’s one of the single best investments of time you can make to further your spreadsheet skills. It’s all about reducing your reliance on the mouse and instead harnessing the awesome efficiency of navigating spreadsheets from the keyboard.
Try these for starters:
Continue reading Excel-fficiency: 10 tips for boosting productivity in Excel
Who doesn’t love a dynamic, animated Excel dashboard?
Here’s one I’ve been working on recently, a data visualization of historical U.S. political data, showing party trends, state populations and sitting presidents over time:
In the following post, I delve into the details of how I created this dashboard. It’s not a full cell-by-cell account of how I did it, because that would require an article at least twice as long, but rather a look at the various steps and thought processes along the way.
If it appears a little ragged, that’s because it probably is! Most likely because I’m writing this bleary eyed at 1am, between feeds and diaper changes of my 6 week old son. 😉
Continue reading Excel tutorial: Building a dynamic, animated dashboard for U.S. political data
Want to build a web scraper in Google Sheets? Turns out, basic web scraping, automatically grabbing data from websites, is possible right in your Google Sheet, without needing to write any code.
You can extract specific information from a website and show it in your Google Sheet using some of Sheets’ special formulas.
For example, recently I needed to find out the authors for a long list of blog posts from a Google Analytics report, to identify the star authors pulling in the page views. It would have been extremely tedious to open each link and manually enter each author’s name. Thankfully, there are some techniques available in Google Sheets to do this for us. Continue reading Using Google Sheets as a basic web scraper
You’re probably familiar with using Google Sheets to organize and analyze your data. But did you know you can build a dynamic Google Sheets dashboard to really understand your data?
With a handful of powerful techniques, you can add some pizzazz and dynamism to the presentation of your data. Here are ten tricks to try next time you’re building a Google Sheets dashboard.
Continue reading 10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard
This time last year I worked with The Write Life during their three-day sale of The Writer’s Bundle, a collection of digital products for writers. I built a dynamic dashboard using Google spreadsheets so the team could visually monitor progress throughout the sale.
This year The Writer’s Bundle 2015 was bigger and better than ever, so I wanted to create an even more useful dashboard for the team. The dashboard was a key tool for the team, to monitor both overall and individual sales channel performance, as well as to be a motivating force by giving everyone a visual sense of progress.
Continue reading Building a dynamic dashboard for a 3-day digital flash sale
