Please participate an improved, small, non-scientific survey about spreadsheet version usage. My previous survey allowed only one version of Excel to be selected for work and for home. I knew that this was limiting, but the survey seemed easier to set up this way. But a few comments corrected my thinking, and a few responses [...]

Update: Survey closed, Results posted This quick and dirty survey has been closed. Thanks to all who participated. Results will be posted in the near future. In addition, a newer and better version of the survey will be/has been posted at New Survey: What Spreadsheet Programs Do You Use? The original survey (shown below) allowed [...]

You’ve exhausted the built-in and online help provided by Microsoft, and don’t have what you need. So where do you go to get help in Excel? There are a large number of resources available to you. Search engines, online forums, and a number of useful general Excel topic web sites, and a huge selection of [...]

There is quite a discussion ongoing in Business intelligence vs. infotainment on Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog. It all started with a marketing guy from Teradata praising the innovation of the data visualization of David McCandless, designer of The Visual Miscellaneum. Stephen Few responded to Teradata’s praise of McCandless’ work in Teradata, David McCandless, and [...]

I’m continually discouraged by people’s misunderstanding of the term “Dashboard” as it relates to understanding their company’s performance. A good dashboard doesn’t have loads of colors and visual effects. A good dashboard isn’t overwhelmed by logos and pictures of actors masquerading as happy employees and customers. A good business (executive, operational, etc.) dashboard is not [...]

For the past two months or so, I have been absent from the blog. Sure, I’ve answered questions and replied to comments people have left. But new articles have been scarce. I have plenty of excuses for this, and none of them involve not having any topics worth posting. I’ll describe a few of them, [...]