On Christmas day, when no one was looking, I peeked at twitter and saw a tweet about an Excel based game called The Worksheet Saga. My first thought was “oh…it’s based on VBA. I wonder if the code is unlocked?”. Read more to see how this game works and how I hacked it to win 🙂 Continue reading
Date Archives → 2017
Who is the blame for Subway Delays?
Subway riders cringe when a delay is announced. Emotions range from mild annoyance to outbursts of anger. Delays inconvenience us and reduce productivity. By default we blame subway management (TTC in Toronto). Is this fair? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had data to determine what causes the delays? Continue reading
Look for keywords inside of a column of text values
On October 17 we celebrated spreadsheet day. It was a day full of excitement around the globe! Crowds gathered around spreadsheets…dancing and drinking occurred into the wee hours of the morning. Part of the celebration included a lookup formula challenge from Debra Dalgleish (spreadsheet day creator). Continue reading
Compare Text Fonts in Excel using VBA
Have you ever had the experience where one event causes you to remember something from years ago? This happened to me today while reading the New Yorker magazine. What does Lucas de Groot, a Dutch typeface designer, have to do with Excel’s VBA language? What is “Fontgate”? Well…read on and I’ll tell you! Continue reading
Video 00167 Sliding Formula Ranges
Data lands in Microsoft Excel in many different structures. Data Analysts like me will often tell you to normalize your data before starting your analysis. This post contains three examples in which normalizing your data might not be necessary when doing a quick analysis. Continue reading
Video 00166 Count Groups Above or Below Targets
This Excel puzzle almost sounds like it could be solved with a quick COUNTIFS function but it’s a bit more involved than that. Nevertheless, it doesn’t have to get complicated as it can still be solved using a few simple steps. Continue reading
Toronto Indoor Ice Rinks
I stumbled across this interesting data-set that lists Toronto’s indoor ice rinks. I thought that it would be fun to visualize the rink locations so I used Excel’s 3D Map feature. Continue reading
Video 00164 Excel Magic Trick 1452 Max Monthly Customer
Customers can make multiple purchases per month. What is the maximum amount that a customer has spent in a single month? This was a video from the amazing Mike Girvin (Excelisfun). The question is clear, but how did Mike solve it? How would you solve it? Continue reading
Video 00165 Show Column Header for Matrix Value
Last week I saw an interesting Excel puzzle from Leila Gharani on YouTube. Leila solved it using a sumproduct function. I made a video showing different solutions. Wasif Mustafa sent me his 3 helper column solution. Then Oz du Soleil created a video showing two solutions. So many ways to solve it! Continue reading
Video 00163 Creating a Weighted Random Dataset in Excel
We can create random data using RANDBETWEEN and INDEX functions. What if you want to create random data that favors some values over others? People have told me that they copy and paste or manually drag the values to repeat them. See how we can automate this with just four easy steps! Continue reading