With a little programming know-how, you can write your own dynamic Windows wallpaper app that can change its color to whatever color you want, to a random color that your app chose for you for the day, or set to your photos, images on a rotating basis or randomly picked from a list from your […]
Category: STEM
How to convert a standard date format <-> Excel date serial number
You may already know that all date type values in Excel are converted to a serial number in Excel. This is an effective way to store date because not only do the digits take less space, it can be calculated upon for all sorts of date maths such as finding difference in days, months, years, […]
Division, Floor Division (Python)
In Python, the single forward slash ‘/’ performs a floating-point division unless you’re using Python 2.x,in which case it performs an integer division with integer operands. The double forward slash //, on the other hand, forces a floor division operator which performs an integer division and returnsthe largest integer less than or equal to the […]
GENETIC QUIRKS OF THE WORLD 2024
Here are some interesting facts (oddities?) from around the world and their associated visuals in Excel. Data source: worlpopulationreview.com Data rounded to nearest single decimal digit when applicable.
How to parse json data from a restaurant
In this blog post, I’ll show you a real-life example of a restaurant menu encoded as a JSON file and how you can parse in your app, and subsequently display it in your custom UI as desired. Suppose you have a menu of items with details encoded in JSON format that looks like this: This […]
Generate Bar Codes, QR Codes in Excel: Quick & Easy Way
In this post, I’ll show you a quick, easy, and a free method that you can use today to generate QR codes, bar codes in UPC-A, UPC-E formats, and custom bar codes based on the product information you enter in Excel as text. How it works Two things are at play here that make it […]
How to calculate streaks in Excel
Streaks refer to trends in the data. These can be linear, exponential, damped, seasonal, irregular/random, stationary, or cyclical. Streaks are important for several reasons: There isn’t any built-in function in Excel for calculating streaks, but there different ways we can make Excel do some of that heavy-lifting by using a combination of functions such as […]
What’s Your Chart Signature? Graphing a name in Excel
Have you ever wondered: how does my name look like if plotted in Excel? Well, wonder no more. In this post, I’ll show you how to enter any name (or any string of characters) and plot it in dynamically to make your unique name come alive as a chart. To make it fully dynamic, I […]
Sorting, grouping, defragging…a visual working demo
Watching a sorting, grouping, or just a defragmentation process graphically is both educational and curiously satisfying. So, I created a Python script that sorts a set of randomly placed, randomly colored, ungrouped tiles on a board by colors so that all like-colored tiles are placed consecutively, adjacently. Think of it like the good old Windows […]
Data cleansing challenge: non-ASCII characters
Non-ASCII characters can pose challenges in data cleansing for several reasons: Therefore, it’s a good practice to standardize or normalize text data to ASCII when possible, or ensure correct handling of non-ASCII characters. This helps to maintain data integrity and simplifies subsequent data processing tasks. Superscripts, subscripts, or “special” characters often look like ascii characters […]