Links and Updates 2008-August-29
by Jon Peltier
Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2009.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Links I have found interesting and worthwhile
Creating KPI Dashboards in Microsoft Excel [Part 2 of 4] – Adding One Click Sort. This is part two of a four-part guest series by Robert on Chandoo’s Pointy-Haired Dilbert blog. This part of the series shows an elegant way to allow sorting by a user selected column in a dashboard table, a very useful technique.
Fabrice Rimlinger’s Sparklines for Excel blog. A set of free User Defined Functions for Excel to create Sparklines: the simple, intense, word-sized graphics invented by Edward Tufte. Includes a free downloadable Excel add-in (beta), and the blog posts are each instructions on how to specify a different sparkline feature. I have not yet tried this utility, but it looks to be full-featured and well-made.
Solving simultaneous equations on Doug Jenkins’ Newton Excel Bach blog. The post shows built-in matrix techniques for solving simultaneous equations, and includes a couple UDF techniques as well.
Do you know any programmers that exhibit these personality traits…? on the Learning Lisp blog.
Cleaning method: put everything that doesn’t have an obvious place into one or more miscellaneous boxes. Once a year throw out most of the boxes when the contents are “stale” enough.
The Complete Flake’s Guide to Getting Things Done by Sonia Simone. Refers to
David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is a terrific system if you’re mentally ill enough to do all the ritual.
Updates to the blog
The Clustered-Stacked Column Charts page has been updated with some examples showing how to adjust your data to achieve different configurations of stacks and clusters.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Places to Go, Things to See (2008-Sept-05)
- Links and Other Trivia for October 3, 2008
- Weekly Links 2008-August-22
- It’s Friday!
- Dashboard Competition
- Links for September 12, 2008
- Edward Tufte and Business Charts
- Interesting Stuff (19 Sept 2008)
- Sparklines and Data Bars in Excel 2010
- Box and Whisker Chart Median Options
Posted: Thursday, August 28th, 2008 under Links.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Fabrice Rimlinger
Time: Friday, August 29, 2008, 1:09 pm
Hi Jon,
thanks for this comment on you blog and above all for the great tips distillated here and there on the web. I owe a big part of what I know about XL.
Just a small remark about the Sparklines UDF : it is not an add-in but simply an workbook w/ vba modules.
This makes it easier to share with users who have no clue about how to install an add-in.
I can’t wait to see your comments about it, as I see (a lot of) room for improvement in the code.
Best regards
Fabrice
Comment from Bob
Time: Saturday, August 30, 2008, 4:42 pm
I’ve tried Fabrice’s vba tools for small graphs and they are great.
The only recommendation I would have would be to allow defining the colors of the bars.
I visit Jon’s blog every day. looking for new ideas and ways to leverage Excel’s charting engine to make information clearer.
Great site and wonderful information.
Cheers,
Bob
Comment from Fabrice Rimlinger
Time: Monday, September 1, 2008, 1:19 pm
@ Bob,
Although I like the standard gray barchart(), I can see an great interest in your request for being able to choose the colors.
The change has been implemented and a new version (2.3.1) available on the site : http://sparklines-excel.blogspot.com/.
Salut !
Comment from Fabrice Rimlinger
Time: Monday, September 1, 2008, 1:21 pm
Bob,
I have added one parameter in the function so you can choose the color of the bars.
A new file is available at http://sparklines-excel.blogspot.com/
Salut !
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