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 helpfully had multiple versions entered as “Other”, so I’m going to set that one aside, and offer the following survey. As it turns out, it was not really any harder to set it up. Live and learn. You can select any and all spreadsheet versions that you use.

WordPress sometimes does funny stuff with embedded content like this survey. If the survey does not appear when the page is first loaded, wait a few seconds, then refresh the page.

Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2011.
 
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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 one response each for version of Excel used at work and home. This ignores those who use multiple versions, for example, developers who need too make sure their spreadsheets will work on any version of Excel.

My main intention in this survey was to get an idea of how many Excel users have upgraded to “New” versions (2007 and 2010), and how many are still using the “Classic” versions (1997 through 2003). The following chart shows my findings.

So about 86% of users have upgraded, while 14% are staying pat. The percentage was almost identical for usage at work and at home. I’m not sure if I’m surprised.

A handful of respondents entered multiple versions into the “Other” boxes in the survey; if these responses included both Classic and New, I didn’t count them. The follow-up survey will try to capture this usage more accurately.

Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2011.
 
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 

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 Excel books.

Direct Inquiries

It’s tempting to send an email directly to me or to another expert whose previous website or forum post has been helpful. I get a dozen or more unsolicited emails a week asking for general Excel help. I welcome questions and clarifications regarding topics posted on my web site, but I don’t often have the time (or motivation) to address emails out of the blue. It’s more effective to post a question on a forum with a broader audience (see below), because many more people will see the question, and several people will respond to a public post before a single busy individual even notices a stray email. I’d rather answer a public question, because it becomes part of the body of public knowledge, more people will see it, and Google will have a chance to pick it up.

Posting a question in a comment to an unrelated blog post is also not very effective. You’ll either have your comment deleted, or if you’re lucky you might get a link to a more relevant post. If you’re on someone’s blog, use their search box to find a more relevant post yourself.

Search Engines

Go to the source, Google. Search for a few related keywords. If the results aren’t what you need, they may at least give you ideas for better keywords. I even use Google to search Microsoft’s site. Use site:microsoft.com as one of your keywords to focus the search on microsoft.com.

Forums

There are a large number of forums devoted to Excel. For some reason, new forums keep popping up, even though a new forum lacks the core of experts and depth of archived information of an established forum. The established forums include Mr Excel, OzGrid, Excel Help Forum, Experts Exchange. I visit various forums from time to time to see if I can answer a few questions.

Choosing a Forum

Qualities of a good forum include:

• Lots of traffic: dozens or hundreds of new threads each day.
• A long history: archives extending back five years or more.
• Recognized experts: members with designations indicating expertise (but watch out for too much game-like clutter, like badges and medals and point counts).
• Relatively few unanswered threads.

How to Ask a Forum Question

• Take a couple minutes to try Google first. Many questions have been asked and answered a thousand times before.
• Spend a few minutes searching the forum’s archives.
• Use a descriptive subject line. I skip posts with subjects like Help!! or Excel Question.
• Write a concise and clear problem statement. State what you are trying to do, what steps you took, and what happened. (Sometimes framing a question well is enough to clarify the problem in your own mind, and you figure it out yourself.) If you get an error message, include the description in its entirety and not just the error number. Sure it’s an effort to retype it, but the error number may correspond to several different descriptions. Error number 1004 means a procedure halted during execution: very informative.
• Include the Excel version somewhere in your problem statement.
• Write clearly, DON’T TYPE IN ALL CAPITALS, don’t use text message shorthand LOL, proofread your post.
• Don’t look for a button to upload your workbook. If you can’t describe your problem without attachments, most people won’t bother trying to answer. If someone wants more information, they will ask for a workbook.
• Be courteous and patient. If your question isn’t answered within several hours or a day, reread the question.
• Don’t bump your own post to bring it to the top of the list. Not everyone is in your time zone or takes breaks when you do, so let your question mellow until someone finds it. Also, adding a post to the thread, even just yourself bumping it, makes the thread look answered, so someone who is looking for unanswered questions will skip yours.

Why isn’t the Forum Answering My Question?

• Is the subject line vague, as in I need excel help!!!?
• Is it so simple that a Google search would have uncovered the answer in 60 seconds?
• Is it written so poorly that nobody wants to try to decipher it?
• Does it look too much like you want someone to do your homework?
• Does it look like you’re asking for someone to do a whole project for free?
• Is it written discourteously?

A Few Forums

Mr Excel is undoubtedly the best of the forums. Mr Excel receives more traffic than the rest, hosts a huge archive of solved issues, and has a large number of knowledgeable users willing to answer questions.

OzGrid used to be focused more on revenue than on the content of the forum, but this has improved in recent years. OzGrid has decent traffic, a good archive, and a number of experts who respond to posts.

While Mr Excel and OzGrid receive a meaningful amount of traffic, most other forums don’t seem to have critical mass.

StackOverflow and SuperUser, which are respectively developer- and power-user-targeted partner forums, have moderate amounts of Excel traffic, and I like the flow of their layout. They are relatively new, but their Excel traffic and archive are expanding.

Microsoft has a number of relevant forums, such as Microsoft Office Excel, Excel for Developers, and VBA. Microsoft’s used to host very good newsgroups, but they ditched the newsgroups in favor of their own forums. The early versions of the forums were unusable. (MS suffers from an incredible case of Not Invented Here, so they are continuously reinventing the wheel, and as we know, Wheel 1.0 is often square.)

The Microsoft forums have improved, and they get a huge amount of traffic, redirected no doubt from the helpless online help, but they lost most of their knowledgeable members when the newsgroups were liquidated. Instead, numerous helpdesk-style contractors respond semi-intelligibly on Microsoft’s behalf.

Excel Help Forum is somewhat active, but you can scroll through a few days’ new posts in just a couple minutes.

Experts Exchange is a good quality forum, but it’s a paid membership service, and its structure is very constraining. Plus it’s overly concerned about scoring answers, to the extent that once a responder got upset that I added to his answer, because he didn’t want to share points. Sheesh, if I’m trying to answer someone’s question, I care if the answer helped. Why do I need points to prove how smart I am?

VBA Express and XL Guru are of good quality, but unfortunately their traffic is too low. Tek-Tips has Office and VBA forums which are intermediate in quality and traffic.

LinkedIn has recently appeared on the scene with its forums. So far most of these these forums have had no value. Most members have no apparent experience with forums, have not developed forum etiquette, and ask dumb questions with answers found easily elsewhere. Then someone will give a lame answer as if it’s actually helpful, and seventeen others will respond with “Me, too!”

I once suggested that a member of a LinkedIn forum visit Mr Excel, and was told by several forum members that the personal interaction on the LinkedIn forum was a great feature. Uh, what? You get the same interaction on Mr Excel and the other forums, only it’s with smart people who can actually help. I no longer spend any time on the LinkedIn forums.

Specific Web Sites

There are a large number of useful Excel web sites and blogs. You’ll find most of them if you use Google well, and if you take note of who is answering questions on the forums. But here are a few noteworthy sites.

Chip Pearson’s Excel Source has hundreds of pages covering a wide variety of topics using worksheet formulas and VBA.

The Spreadsheet Page is John Walkenbach (Mr Spreadsheet)’s site filled with free tips, downloads, and other stuff, plus information about his books and other Excel products.

ExcelUser is Charley Kyd’s site directed toward business users of Microsoft Excel. ExcelUser has written about Excel dashboards, and offered dashboard-related products for Excel, since authors of other dashboard web sites were still in grade school.

Contextures is Debra Dalgleish’s site of Excel Tips and Tutorials. If you have a question about pivot tables, autofilters, conditional formatting, data validation, you’ll find the answer here.

Chandoo.org has a number of free and paid Excel learning resources by everyone’s favorite, Chandoo.

Excel Books

There are innumerable books on all aspects of working with Excel. I won’t list them here; instead I’ll direct you to my web page that lists the Excel Books that I own and actually use. (I own others that I don’t find useful, and I’ve left them off the list.) I update this book list every so often, when I’ve gotten a couple new books or when a new version of Excel has been released. Disclosure: the book page contains Amazon Affiliate links, as does the sidebar of this page, so if enough of you buy enough books, I’ll be able to start posting from exotic vacation destinations.

Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2011.
 
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 

I will let the dozens of comments under Nathan’s post speak to the debate about McCandless’ efforts, which I find eye-catching but generally not effective at sharing actual information. However, I did want to share my thoughts on why so many of us continue to use ineffective visualization techniques.

“People like ineffective graphics”

A number of commenters stated that that people like attractive, sexy-looking presentations and fluffy pictures, regardless of their shortcomings. Andrew Vande Moere of Infosthetics suggests that we try to “learn why people actually prefer the less ‘effective’ infographic” (and he specifically mentioned “circular graphs”), so that we can improve the general state of data presentation.

Few replied, “I’m not aware of any research offhand that specifically attempts to explain why some people (certainly not all) prefer forms of display that don’t effectively provide what they need from the information.”

I have a hypothesis about this, pure speculation really, but others may add to it, or at least be amused.

Why do we love pie charts?

We don’t like ineffective graphics, we like familiar graphics.

We learn pie charts from Miss Jones in second grade. Miss Jones teaches many subjects and has to keep a classroom orderly and well-mannered, so she is by no means an expert in data visualization techniques. However, she is a person of authority and we naturally follow her example.

Over the years, we see many pie charts, taught to every second grader by all the well-meaning Miss Joneses out there. The pies are ubiquitous, so we become familiar with them, and we never realize their limitations.

Since all of out software packages, particularly the expensive shiny ones, offer pie charts prominently, we assume they are among the best charting options.

When we see an icon for a 3D pie chart, we click on it, because after all, it’s one whole D better than 2D.

Pies have been ingrained in our consciousness for so long, they become one of the first things we reach for.

Proof That Circular Graphics Are Not Intuitive

Maybe “proof” is too strong a word, but what follows is certainly a telling demonstration.

To anyone who doubts how unintuitive circular charts (pies etc.) truly are, I have a simple question: Have you ever taught a young child to read an analog clock?

– -

If children know their numerals, they can read “8:47″ on a digital clock, and at least know it’s between 8 and 9 o’clock. In time they even learn that :47 means closer to 9:00 than to 8:00. On an analog clock, 8:47 is obviously closer to the following hour, but knowing the hour isn’t easy. You either have to estimate the angle of the hour hand, or you have to count and interpolate between ticks or read the numerals. Clocks with a square face have lost some of the supposed effectiveness of circular symmetry. And don’t forget the additional difficulty provided by hours expressed in Roman numerals.

Disclosure: The clock images above are affiliate links to product pages on Amazon, where you can purchase such clocks, and earn me a teeny commission. There is a round Whatever clock hanging in the hall outside my office.

A Defense of Pie Charts

I have read Robert Kosara’s recent In Defense of Pie Charts in his Eager Eyes blog. He points out (as Stephen Few did way back in Save the Pies for Dessert (pdf)) that pies have one advantage over other types of graphs: you can readily compare combinations of adjacent wedges. In a pie with four wedges, for example, you can compare A+B to C+D. You can also compare A+D to B+C. However, unless this is planned it is simply the result of an accidental arrangement of the data, since you may in fact be more interested in comparing A+C to B+D.

I’ve always felt that this argument is an afterthought, a rationalization for having used that pie in the first place. If you knew a priori that the comparison of added data points was important, you could easily enough have prepared a stacked bar chart with A+C vs. B+D, or even with all pairs. This would of course be preceded by a bar chart comparing all of the individual points.

Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2011.
 
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 

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 reminiscent of an aviator’s cockpit.

I’ve found a wonderful description of a dashboard, in How to Build a Data-Driven Startup on David Cancel’s blog. This is slide 41 from his presentation this summer at the Lean Startup Circle.

The following slides give crucial advice for what goes into dashboards, and what you should do with the resulting observations.

Thanks to @JanWillemTulp for the heads up.

Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2011.
 
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 

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, and you can judge how valid they are.

Classes

I taught two classes, a three day Excel Dashboard Bootcamp in Texas with Mike Alexander of DataPig Technologies and the Bacon Bits blog, and a one-day Excel Dashboard class here in Massachusetts with Alex Kerin of DataDriven Consulting who blogs here. During preparation for the classes, I suspended my blogging, and I couldn’t get back into the habit.

The classes were very successful, and I’m considering how to offer this advanced material over a broader geographical area.

Error Remediation

I’ve gotten reports from some foreign users that my utilities either raise errors during execution or make mistakes when labeling charts. It turns out that in Excel 2003 and earlier, some regional versions of Excel do not treat link addresses in chart text elements correctly in VBA. For example, in German Excel 2003, VBA code fails while creating a link from a data label to a worksheet cell. In French Excel 2003, similar VBA code fails when creating a link from an axis title to a worksheet cell. These failures occur despite correctly converting English R1C1 (Row-Column) notation into, for example, German Z1S1 (Zeile-Spalte) notation. I know the conversion is correct, because some text element links are correctly created, just not these that I’ve identified.

A small consolation to users of Excel 2007 is that Microsoft rebuilt their regionalization system in Office 2007, and these problems no longer seem to occur. For Excel 2003 users, I’m dumbing down the labels to include static text.

Work

A few of my long time clients have requested follow up projects, and this cuts into time available for blogging. I’m not taking on new projects, not enough time for that.

Non-Work

Several non-work activities are taking time away from blogging. Last fall I needed physical therapy to fix my shoulders, which were inflexible from years of poor posture, probably related to too many years of sitting hunched over the keyboard. The shoulders are great now, thanks, though I’ll never pitch again (but could I ever?).

The therapy group is located in the front half of a building, and they run a gym in the back half. I decided I needed to keep up with my shoulder exercises and I needed to get myself back into shape, with the World Cup coming up and everything. So I joined the gym. It’s a great gym, too. It has tons of equipment, especially free weights, so there’s never any waiting. The staff is very knowledgeable and helpful. And people don’t show up just to be seen in their fancy workout clothes.

Also last year, my daughter told me she’d teach me some chords on her guitar so I could pretend to play a real guitar, nor pretend to play an air guitar. Well, she went off to college, but she left her guitar at home. I’d always wanted to play guitar, and my daughter had planted the seed in my head. I found out that a friend of the family studied music theory and guitar performance in college, and he’s giving me lessons.

I’m really bad, but I’m making progress pretty rapidly. I can find the tabs for a favorite song online and play recognizable riffs. I’ve just started working on a few whole songs, like Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding and Santa Monica by Everclear. It’s wicked fun, and I wish I’d started years ago.

The hour-plus workouts three or four times a week and the 30 to 90 minute daily guitar practice sessions are well spent, but reduce blogging time. Before my hiatus I was posting 4 or 5 articles a week, but I may take a lesson from Chandoo and aim for 2 or 3 weekly posts.

Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2011.
 
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.