Spreadsheet Day

Excel Is For Lists Not Formulas

Sure, you use Excel for all kinds of fancy calculations. Your workbooks are full of mega-formulas and user-defined functions. Your macros magically summarize the data, and you create monthly reports with the click of a button. But what about the guy in the next cubicle? Does he use Excel for anything more than a grocery [...]

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Freedom From Spreadsheets

How much personal stuff do you track with spreadsheets? Does all that tracking take the fun out of your free time? It’s not just you – in her blog, Vicariously Yours, Sarah Layden talks about her years of recording all the books that she read. "I tallied my reading habits on nerdalicious spreadsheets, sharing and [...]

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Feeding Your Monster Spreadsheets

How often has this happened to you? You started out with a simple Excel spreadsheet, to track one or two key items. Before long, that spreadsheet has turned into a monster – dozens of columns (or more!), and you’re constantly entering data. Those spreadsheets remind me of Audrey, the hungry plant in Little Shop of [...]

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Excel Student Budget: Spreadsheet Day 2011

Happy Spreadsheet Day! Each year, on October 17th, we celebrate our wonderful worksheets and terrific templates. This is the date that VisiCalc was first released to customers, in 1979. To participate in Spreadsheet Day, please keep reading, to see our theme for this year, and how you can join in. Student Spreadsheets This year, our [...]

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Preparing for Spreadsheet Day 2011

It’s only 9 days until Spreadsheet Day 2011 – Monday, October 17th. Have you got your office party organized? Are you taking the day off, to make a long weekend for the holiday? Share the Spreadsheet Joy To celebrate Spreadsheet Day 2011, let’s work on a spreadsheet challenge. Could you create and share a free [...]

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VisiCalc’s Dan Bricklin at Apple WWDC 2011

The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is running this week in San Francisco. On the WWDC website, you can only see the schedule if you log in, so I don’t know how much time is devoted to spreadsheets at the conference. My guess – not much. However, Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, was at WWDC, [...]

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Excel at the London 2012 Olympics

Yes, an Excel spreadsheet can do all kinds of magical things, and you can push it well beyond its expected limits. But, you also have to know when to quit pushing. In an article in today’s Register, the author, Kelly Fiveash, has uncovered a job advertisement for someone to manage the London 2012 Olympics “Cultural [...]

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Perfect Unions With Excel Wedding Plans

When my son got married, we did some of the wedding planning in Excel, and it helped things go smoothly. We even used the seating plan workbook on my Contextures website, that helps you figure out where to put that annoying uncle at dinner time. Today I saw this post – My Big Fat Excel [...]

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First Demo of VisiCalc

Thirty-two years ago today, on May 12, 1979, Dan Bricklin demonstrated the new spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, at the 4th West Coast Computer Faire, in San Francisco. On his Benlo Park website, Peter Jennings describes the event: We rented a special room to secretly demonstrate VisiCalc to key industry luminaries. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Adam Osborne, [...]

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Track Goals and Activities in Excel

David Seah produces a compact calendar each year, in Excel format, that you can download from his website. It’s a vertical format, with a row for each week, and the month start dates highlighted. He also posts a monthly review of his goals and activites, under the heading of Groundhog Day Resolution Review. In his [...]

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