Mr Excel's Latest Articles

Did you know you can set up a simulator and play craps in Excel? Follow these simple steps and you can be throwing virtual dice ... and look like you are working on a spreadsheet while doing it.

Problem: You rarely use half of the icons in the Standard or Formatting toolbar. Why not create a Steve-O toolbar with just your favorites?

Problem: You run an ice cream stand. After 10 days of sales, you discover that you either make a lot of money or nearly go broke. As you analyze sales, you feel that temperature and rain might be two important determining factors. On rainy or cool days, fewer people buy ice cream.

In his book, Success Made Easy, retail guru Ron Martin suggests using a daily chart to track your progress towards a goal. His chart shows progress towards the goal as well as where you need to be to remain on track. In the image, the straight line is the track.

Problem: You have a large formula. You would like to visually see how the cell is calculated.

Problem: Every time you type the name of your WYA Division, as shown in Fig. 147, Excel changes “WYA” to “WAY”, as shown in Fig. 148. It is impossible to type WYA without entering it as a formula: =”W”&”Y”&”A.

Problem: You want to buy a car. You want to compare eight price points and four loan terms to calculate the monthly payment amount.

Problem: You have twelve monthly worksheets in a workbook. You’ve made changes to January and now need to copy the changes to the other eleven worksheets.

Problem: You suspect that there are cells in your data with text numbers instead of numbers. There is no easy way to visually locate these cells in versions before Excel 2002. In Excel 2002, these text cells, as well as a variety of other potential errors, are noted by a dark green triangle in the upper left corner of the cell. As shown in Fig. 161, cells C4 and E4 have a triangle in their upper left corners because they are text entries that look like numbers.

Problem: You created a chart with the F11 key. You need this chart to be an embedded chart. How can you change the location of the chart?