If you’re anything like me, you’ve at least once wondered: How can I get Excel to show me all the Friday-13ths in any given year? Well, I have (don’t ask me why)…and here’s the solution. I found a couple of ideas on how to do this, but my method I believe, is the most straight-forward […]
Tag: education
About your birthday and more (Excel)
Here’s a basic application in Excel I put together for fun that gives information about a birth date. For example, which day of the week was the person born? What’s the zodiac sign? The zodiac symbol for the person, and also a direct link to a web site to find his/her horoscope information (including daily […]
Ranked, custom charts and animation (Excel)
In this blog, I share how to use simple data, and create some meaningful charts, even with animation and custom graphics. Along the way, I’ll demonstrate techniques to rank and spark some ideas on PowerPoint<->Excel interaction. Let’s start with the dataset. Following are the responses from a survey of 1,002 consumers from a couple of […]
Fight to the end-Draw vs AI (Chess)
An interesting game video between me and the AI where we had a blood bath early in the game and it had recouped its Queen, lost it again, and then betted on getting another one, but alas, it didn’t and it came down to one pawn advantage…finally only the kings remained.
Messaging/Communication
Which messaging worked better you think in each of the following situations? And why? Carwash Punchcard: Hotel Towel Reuse:
Random Fun with Excel
This is a seemingly useless but visually fun usage of visuals, combined with Excel functions and VBA I did to take a break from my typical gnarly Excel analytics work 🙂 How it works: 1. Fill in a formula to generate random numbers between 1 and 100 (inclusive) across the cell range. 2. Apply 2 […]
A simple dataset with many questions (and answers!)
I’ll start with a simple dataset and demonstrate how many critical questions can arise just from this. You can now imagine in a real-world situation, how many more complex questions can be asked and information gleaned! But if we can’t extract the key answers from this table, we won’t be able to tackle even the […]
Simple & brilliant way to extract multiple matches in one cell
 The scenario: You have a dataset with values in one column that’s unique (or semi-unique) and another column with its associated values as Key:Value pairs but that column has repeating values. Imagine a list of members whose names are in one column and their corresponding membership status next to it as below: What we […]
How many real days…net? (Excel)
This is one of the simple and yet powerful tips when working with Dates in Excel. To calculate the number of workdays between two dates BUT EXCLUDING weekends (depending on your locale settings), we can use NETWORKDAYS(). In US and most western countries, Saturdays and Sundays would be excluded from the calculation. Without changing your […]
Phone number formatting tips (Excel and Python)
For most people working with data for a significant amount of time, formatting raw data from different sources are both a reality and a pain. Today, I show different ways to format an un-formatted string that contains phone numbers using Python, and Excel. Our task is to format it (either for human-reporting, or consumption by […]