Spreadsheet Roundup 20200224

by Debra · Published February 24, 2020 · Updated February 20, 2020

Here is a roundup of selected spreadsheet articles that I’ve read recently. You’ll find interesting tips, useful sample files, and new ideas for your own spreadsheets.

For Excel tips and tutorials, visit my Contextures website.

Expand Your Skills

Power Query: Don’t let your Excel skills fall behind! To stay current, invest some time to learn more about Power Query. Mike Girvin has lots of free PQ videos on his YouTube channel (ExcelIsFun), so check out his Power Query playlist, and get started.

Get Hired: If you’re looking for a new job, here are a few tips on how to include your Excel skills in your résumé.

New Features: What’s new in Excel, and are you ready to use the new features? Chris Newman looks forward to trying these 5 new Excel features this year. And the Register looks at a couple of new features coming to Excel — Office Scripts and the XLOOKUP function.

Game Plan: On Reddit, someone asked, “I have two weeks to master excel – what should my game plan be?” and there are lots of good suggestions, including the free university-run Excel classes at Coursera.

Spreadsheet Problems

Slow Macros: Excel macros ran really slowly in a workbook that someone sent to me. The problem was caused by an Excel custom function (UDF) that ran for no apparent reason, and slowed other macros down. See what I did to make things a bit faster.

TIP: Charles Williams sells a FastExcel add-in, that helps you find performance problems in Excel files. Read more about in this FastExcel review on my site.

Confusing Charts: Jon Peltier takes a look at confusing Excel bar charts, and suggests other ways to present the data

Working with Data

Data Viz: Evelina Judeikyte shares a list of the resources she used last year, while improving her data visualization skills. And as she says, “Nothing beats learning by doing. In repetition.” via David Napoli

Excel Tips: The FireEye blog shows a few tricks for cleaning up data in a spreadsheet, with lots of formula examples.

Data Analysis: If you ever work with messy data in Excel, you’ll relate to the data nightmare problems that Dr. Kate Lakowski had, when using someone else’s data. What a tangled “web” it was!

______________________________