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  • Speed up data-entry tasks by using End Mode

    The other day, I was filling out a huge Excel table, and I found myself needing to enter the exact same information in multiple cells. To save time, I used something called End mode in combination with the arrow keys on my keyboard to quickly select all the cells I needed to change. Many of my own coworkers have never heard of End mode, so I thought you might not know about it either. It's a handy status bar option, and in my opinion it's often easier to use than fill down when you need to...
  • Excel Services content refresh is live

    If you're a developer, you may have been wondering..."When are they EVER going to revise the Excel Services JavaScript Object Model (JSOM) documentation for SharePoint Server 2010?" Well, I'm glad you asked! The SharePoint Server 2010 Software Development Kit (SDK) online documentation has been refreshed, and I'm happy to announce that as part of that refresh, the Excel Services JSOM documentation was also updated--in fact, it's been completely revised. Keep reading to learn...
  • How it's Made: Tower Defense - a Game in Excel 2010

      This blog post is brought to you by Karen Cheng a Program Manager on the Excel team.     In today's post, we'll show you how the arcade game Tower Defense was created in an Excel spreadsheet (see a video of the game being played here ).  In this game, creeps move toward your castle. You must defend it by placing towers which shoot at the creeps. The more creeps you kill, the more money you get to buy and upgrade your towers. To play, you'll need - · To download the...
  • Excel Team Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts – Part 1 of 3

    In this series of posts I’ve decided to walk through some of my favorite Excel keyboard shortcuts and a few other little tricks I’ve learned along the way that helps me work faster. In fact, when visiting some analysts in financial services, I learned that when they get trained on Excel, the instructor actually unplugs the mouse from the classroom computers in order to really drive home the efficiencies that can be gained from keyboard shortcuts. But when I say these are my favorites what I really...
  • New Posts From One of the Principal Developers Behind Excel Services

    One of our most senior developers on Excel Services, Shahar Prish, is busy writing posts in his blog on the new programmability features in the 2010 version of Excel Services. The first set of posts talk about REST and moving forward he will expand to the new JavaScript OM we added this release. Here are the links, if you care at all about building custom solutions for Excel and Excel Services they are a great read: General posts about REST: Welcome to the new Excel Services So what does REST on...
  • Excel Services in SharePoint 2010 REST API Examples

    Thanks to Christian Stich for putting together this series on the REST API. In this final installment on the REST API, we’ll walk through a couple examples of using the REST API to embed spreadsheet data in new and interesting ways. Embedding a ‘Live’ Chart on a SharePoint Wiki Page. For this example we are embedding an Excel scatter chart on a SharePoint wiki page. The scatter chart works like an analog clock, so that you can see that the data returned via REST is dynamic, and the workbook containing...
  • Copying Worksheets with a List or Table

    Today’s author is Ron de Bruin, an Excel MVP . You can find more useful tips from Ron and links to Excel add-ins at his website: http://www.rondebruin.nl/ Problem : It is not possible to copy more than one sheet to a new workbook or existing workbook if there is a List (Excel 2003) or a Table (Excel 2007) in one of the worksheets. How to reproduce: In a new workbook with two or more sheets, add a table or a list in one of the worksheets. Select more than one sheet with the CTRL key held down. (Be...
  • Remove Zeros and Blanks from a List of Values

    Today’s author is Bob Umlas, Excel MVP and author of This isn’t Excel, it’s Magic, a book that is filled with tips and tricks for getting the most out of Excel. This post shows you how to quickly remove zero values and blank cells from a list that contains values. Here’s a formula which enables you to access a list of values interspersed with zeros or blanks and it will pick up only the non-zero values in the same sequence they’re listed. It’s better to illustrate. Suppose you have this list in A1...
  • Creating a Custom Popup Menu

    Today’s author is Derek Mang, owner of Systems Solution Developers Inc. You can find more useful tips from Derek on his website: www.officevbasolutions.com . This post shows you how to create a custom popup menu in Excel. Microsoft Excel has lots of popup menus that are made available to the user with a right-click depending on what your doing - hence the term context menu. Right-click on a cell and you get the Excel "cell" popup menu and its available choices. This menu is subject to customization...
  • One More Sparkline Trick

    In this blog post I’ll walk through one more interesting way you can use sparklines in Excel 2010. In the above example we have the sales for each book category and for each store. While you can’t see the exact numbers in this view, you can get the feel for which sections sell well at the different stores. Let’s see how this is made with sparklines in Excel: There are actually 24 sparklines in the picture above; each one is bound to a single data point in a similar table with the numbers. You can...
  • A Sparkline Trick - Using the Horizontal Axis as a Reference Line

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have the data for the employee sign-up contest, this is a contest where employees try to get customers to sign-up for a bookstore club card. The contest has gone on for several weeks now, and each employee has a goal of 20 sign-ups per week. Right now the sparklines are conveying the history of sign-ups for each employee, for example...
  • Sparklines – Lining Up the Points

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have sales for each year, the cost of sales, and net profit for that year all divided by the category of book. One of the things you can do with sparklines in Excel 2010 is to stick them in cells above or below each other and have the points line up. Doing this will allow you to see trends for multiple fields in a related way. Here...
  • Sparkline Axis Options

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the axis options for sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the number of books by category for each month. The sparklines in this example are giving the history of the count of books for each category, and it looks like they are at their lowest over the past half year or so. Let’s take look at the axis options for these sparklines. Selecting the sparklines gives you a sparkline...
  • Formatting Sparklines

    In this blog post I’ll walk through formatting sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the net profit by month for the three book stores in 2008. The net profit number alone can tell you which stores are doing well, but the sparklines help identify trends behind the number: Seattle and Houston both dipped in the summer, in general their profits climbed as the year went on, and Richmond didn’t do well until the last month...
  • Adding Some Spark to Your Spreadsheets

    In this blog post I’ll walk through creating sparklines in Excel 2010 using a sample table from the book store demo file: In the table we have the sales for the month of June: a column for total sales for the month, multiple columns for each day’s sales, and rows that break out different book categories. Sparklines will really be able to enhance the table and add to the understanding of the numbers by plotting out the month’s sales day by day in a single column, in line with the data. To get started...
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