Author: Debra Dalgleish

Ah, the weekend. Relax and enjoy some time with your family, and Excel. You might have time to play some games, but if you have homework, don’t leave it till Sunday night – do it now! (I’m sure that I did all my homework on Saturday, way back when I was in school.)

Kid Unfriendly

• My child is playing around with an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve corrupted her already.
• The wife and I put an Excel spreadsheet together yesterday to manage my various plugin projects. Man, I should have done this earlier.
• My mom now knows how to make her own excel spreadsheet. That was a challenge but to see her change columns is rewarding.
• Just created an excel spreadsheet for our DVDs categorized by "Kid Unfriendly" "Kids" "TV Series" and "Holiday." Does that make me anal?
• Husband put our entire life into excel. Hate the constraints of all those little lines and boxes! Sometimes a girl needs circles!

Playing Games

• really hate staying up all night working on excel project unable to play my games on facebook except for a few
• What can I do for the next 2 hours that looks like work but isn’t? Sudoku kind of looks like Excel… hmm… worth a shot.
• It’s crazy how seriously I’m taking iFarm. Excel and ROI calculations are involved. I will have a windmill before EOW.

Finish Your Homework

• has not yet started his stupid AEM 145 Excel Assignment yet because… 1. i don’t get it and 2. i don’t really wanna get it.
• I know I have to use it but I don’t like using Excel for accounting homework. I can make it look better when I do it by hand.
• excel ate my homework
• Poor person who borrowed my computer, the scratch paper on my desk shows me you did all of the math by hand for your Excel assignment!

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P.S. For your Excel entertainment needs, Andy Pope has an Excel Sudoku file that you can download, and there’s a DVD Collection Database template on my website.

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According to today’s Excel tweets, bosses don’t excel in Excel. I’m sure some bosses know what they’re doing, and their employees are too busy to spend the day complaining on Twitter!

But, if your boss drives you crazy, or Excel ruins your day, you can always turn to drink. Or philosophy.

Who’s the Boss?

• I just submitted an excel spreadsheet as a document turn in. Boss is upset that it’s not in "table form". Not sure how that is possible.
• Dear Boss, why did I want to give you a PDF and not the actual excel sheet? Because I knew you’d eff it up. And you did. Thanks!
• Why is it that my boss wants to use a SUPER-DUPER-ULTRA-DETAILED Excel file? Not only will this create triplicate work, but it’s error prone
• Client asks what position his firm is in a list. Boss prints out excel sheet with (a long) unordered list and tells me to count.
• Office Rule #2: When sending an e-mail attachment of an excel spreadsheet to a superior do NOT call it a spreadshit.
• watching my boss use Excel was torture, my control freak self nearly had a meltdown
• Fun with excel: My boss wants to get rid of "that heavy border," the box that highlights the active cell. Nope, it’s not going anywhere.

Driven to Drink

• My triumph against the evil of Excel is almost complete. Then I’m off work for 4 days. I predict one or more drinks may soon be had.
• still at work. my coworker just brought wine to the office. my excel sheets just became a little bit more interesting.

Draw Your Own Conclusion

• My prof is /drawing/ an "excel "spreadsheet in the board. Yay technology.
• i guess ‘we’ (my department) has decided that using 2x (redundancy) whiteboards is more efficient than using an excel spreadsheet/database

Philosophy Corner

• Looking at a row of insipidness in a collum of inconsequence on someone’s excel spreadsheet of life.

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P.S. If your boss want you to count, you can use one of these Excel Count Functions. And if the boss wants “Table Form”, maybe an Excel Table will solve the problem.

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Some people use Excel for simple things, like a shopping list, or a bit of homework. Other people are more ambitious, and spend their days analyzing data. It’s funny though – the shopping list people seem happier than the analysts.

But either of those activities is better than helping your dad with his Excel problems. Unless, of course, your dad is a data analyst.

Analyze This

• Dear MS Excel, please play nice with MATLAB, I need you two for the data-analyzings!
• boycotting Que Publishing…1 of their books suggest to get data OUT of a database, IN to Excel so it is "easier" to analyze – Idiots!
• Has anyone used totaltesting.com or other remote excel skills test? I want to screen analysts for advanced excel skills. Thx.
• Arg. Stupid Macs not being able to do histograms in Excel. I’m trying to analysis the last 22,000 songs played on my favorite radio station
• anyone know how to use the data analysis tools in excel? Started my statistical reasoning in psychology class today.
• Going to be doing some trend analysis at work, I’m super nervous boss asked if I was pretty good with excel and bought my comp a license

Dear Dad

• Just given 50-year-old butcher dad first excel lesson.Told him how lucky he is being taught by a SQL coder.He just stared at me
• I just had a lesson from my Dad in credit cards and fancy excel tricks. Nice.
• another call from my dad wanting me to fix something in excel over the phone
• Creating a great Excel spreadsheet – another adult pleasure my childhood self would have scoffed at. My dad, data analyst, would be proud.

Christmas With Excel

• I can’t get a grasp of what gifts I have, what’s left to buy & who I’m leaving out accidentally. Clearly, it’s time for an Excel spreadsheet
• Glad for the Christmas baking Excel spreadsheet I made a few years ago. Calculates a shopping list with quty of ingredients for me!
• Yikes! My excel Christmas shopping document has disappeared! Poof!
• I have a excel spreadsheet, dating back to 2003, with details of all xmas presents I have bought by person with price and where I got them!

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P.S. For help with histograms, see Jon Peltier’s page on Histograms in Microsoft Excel. And if you need help planning Christmas, you can download my free Excel Christmas Planner.

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Now that more people are using the Excel 2010 beta, they’re tweeting about it. Some are excited about the new features, others…not so much. Some of my clients use Walmart Retail Link reports, so I’ll have to warn them about the problem in 2010.

And speaking of features, that person who needs the opposite of the Concatenate function could use Excel’s Text To Columns feature.

New Excel

• #Microsoft #Office 2010. Nothing new that excites me except Word Paste Preview and Excel Sparklines. Decided not to try the beta.
• 2010 Excel will not open Walmart Retail Link reports…This is a big problem, on my way back to 2007.
• I’m disappointed with Excel 2010’s V-Lookup feature for large amounts of data. It’s better than 2007 but still slow.
• Excel 2010 will add pivot tables that can be based on multiple tables of data. Woohoo! What, that sort of stuff doesn’t turn you on? Weird.
• *the new Excel. I could work the old one (believe it or not). graphs- done, now for the rest of the report.

New Functions

• Why doesn’t excel have a word count function? Stupid!
• Does anyone know the opposite of the "concatenate" function in Excel?
• Why doesn’t excel show the fx bar when I double-click a cell? It says on the formatting tab.
• Loving the Filtering facilities in Excel 2007 versus previous versions. Obviates writing code for many rather simple cases. A few clicks…

So Sleepy

• Sleepy.. One of the disadvantages of getting up to work on an Excel spreadsheet at 4 in the morning…
• Monday morning nightmare: 3hours class how to use excel. Almost fell asleep there 😀
• Poppies…. Poppies will put them to sleep. And if that don’t work, Excel will!

Needs More Sleep?

• Just noticed the person next to me is working on an Excel spreadsheet he titled "killme.xls" Remember, we’re all stressed about something…

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P.S. For quick filtering in Excel 2007 you can use the AutoFilter by Selection feature.

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People love pivot tables, with the exception of a few, including the person who posted the first tweet shown below. The rest of us are glowing, while living the easy life.

A Good Pivot Table

• Excel and pivot tables were created by someone with a deep-rooted hatred for people.
• It’s been three days, and I’m still glowing because people called my pivot table beautiful and professional. #dorktastic
• The only thing missing from my day is a good pivot table. Fingers crossed.
• Showing people pivot tables on excel is so fun. Seriously. The joy they get when they realize how easy life can be now is gratifying.
• is becoming a pivot table expert in preparations for Monday.

Compulsive Savers

• No freaking way to undo beyond a save in Excel??? Hating Microsoft software with a passion. Begging for Numbers.
• Remind me again.Why does Excel say sure you want to close without saving. Oh yeah, it’s so I can say no and loose all the work ive done 🙁
• Ugh. Excel just crashed 30 min worth of work…good thing I’m a compulsive saver or it could have been more…

Question of the Day

• Ever get the feeling that life’s just one big excel spreadsheet after another?

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P.S. If you want to save your Excel file with VBA, try the code in Jon Peltier’s article today: Robust VBA Save-As Technique

Or, follow Jon’s advice in the comments below:  “If you want to autosave your files to prevent losing too much data in case of a crash, don’t use the built-in autosave feature. Instead use Jan Karel Pieterse’s AutoSafe utility. It is much friendlier, and it doesn’t overwrite the current file, it instead saves a copy. AutoSafe it about the 4th item on this page: http://www.jkp-ads.com/download.asp

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Welcome to the weekend edition of Excel Twitters. It’s time to relax with friends and family, have some fun, and think about non-work things.

Speaking of fun, I don’t think that any Excel message provides more entertainment value than that “Minor loss of fidelity” alert. (Note: You can find a bit of help with Excel version compatibility on the Microsoft website.)

And who knew that Excel could be used as a wardrobe system for people who have outgrown Garanimals?

Fun and Games

• Sitting in pub next to an office party. Boss wearing mistletoe deeleyboppers, shouting about Excel. Crazy times for the boys from accounts!
• I ask my server for a good lounge he comes back with an Excel spreadsheet of dance clubs/bars/lounges talk about service
• Why my boy make a "connect 4" game out of an excel spreadsheet, and we playin over email…LOL, its actually pretty fun!
• Whoever invented games that work on Excel spreadsheets is a genius. When minimised your boss has no idea. Epic.

Love and Fidelity

• Got an error in Excel spreadsheet yesterday: "Minor Loss of Fidelity." Have decided to name my next album that.
• Excel has just warned me that saving my workbook in this format will cause "a minor loss of fidelity". Am now awaiting call from girlfriend.
• oh Excel, i thought you and i were a love story and you go and crash and give me the cold shoulder. i still love u. now get back to work.
• My roomate’s girlfriend is color coding his wardrobe and making an excel spread sheet of what outfits he can wear. Ummm…
• You have an excel spreadsheet for dating ? I think I may be seeing some of the problem you’ve been having lately… ahem… =]

Dramatic Arts

• excel consuming / every one of my brain cells / barely any left #haiku #haikuchallenge #work
• So today I’m playing with something called a pivot table. I’m rubbish at these and am considering faking a heart attack to get out it.

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P.S. There’s no Connect 4 game on Contextures Blog, but you can download an Excel Bingo game.

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Another day in Twitter, another word to Google. I’d never heard of Heinzelmännchen – had you? However, there have been more than a few Excel files that tested my swagger!

It’s a Living

• sometime an excel analysis may not mean anything and can be made to say anything that you wanna point to………. still got to do :-))
• In a meeting that consists of me sitting behind someone and watching them copy and paste links into an Excel spreadsheet.
• Nothing like putting the finishing touches on a project and then thinking, "Oh. That would have been a lot easier in Excel than in Word."
• Outside for a moment while my Excel sheet calculates. Smokers see the outdoors much more than I do.
• Only in my office will a 40yr old man say ‘ha! This excel file is testing my swagger’ wtf???

Heinzelmännchen?

• it took me two hours find out how to draw a histogram.Microsoft help didnt help I gave up and drew a bar chart instead.Excel is confusing!!
• Too many B-school grads are paid to churn out Excel tables, charts. No insights, elegant thinking there.
• Yes! All but one slide/two charts done. Could adding a second vertical axis to an Excel diagram be any less obvious??
• How did MSFT’s Excel EVER become the standard? Each time I open it up some chart has changed its formating…Heinzelmännchen? Don’t think so

Get the Lead Out

• At the end of the day, a pen and a notebook are still more reliable than a laptop and ms excel.

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P.S. Hurry! Buy the ExcelUser Dashboard Template kits at 50% off. Sale ends at midnight (Pacific Time).

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Some days we like formulas, some days we hate them, and some days we don’t even know which formula to use. Oh well, at least we have our friends to support us during the tough times. Or do we?

Tomorrow Will Suck

• Finished a budget management solution in Excel incorporating forecast and actuals variance analysis, all thanks to the SUMPRODUCT formula.
• The "transpose" feature of Excel is a bunch of crap
• How do you find out which excel function achieves the result you want? There’s too many to choose from! Blessed be the miracle of choice…
• Goddamn you Excel array formulas. I hate you more than Iceland (the store not the country)
• when i reinvent the qwerty keyboard, i’m NOT going to require a 2-button command to add parenthesis! makes excel work sooooo much longer!
• I hate tiny errors that occur in excel formulas that throw off my entire project and then take 90 mins for me to fix. Tomorrow will suck.

Real Life

• Playing with excel ……. that’s what my weekends have become ……..
• For every new Excel keyboard shortcut I learn, I might as well be CNTRL ALT Delete’ing my chances for friends in real life.
• I could see you with an excel spread sheet with all your friends on the X axis and your feelings on the Y axis.
• I’m thinking of creating a 2010 ‘Spontaneity Shedule’ in an Excel spreadsheet… 😉

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P.S. For help with SUMPRODUCT see Excel Sum Functions — Sum Excel Cells and Bob Phillips’ page on Understanding SUMPRODUCT.

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Excel tweets are not only entertaining, they’re educational. For example, I thought rigmarole was correctly spelled rigamarole, but either spelling is accepted, at least in North America.

And this batch of tweets had me googling for Balboa Turkey Trot, W2tF, Rick Flair, and FFXII. So little time, so much to learn!

New Words

• I managed to create a clustered and stacked bar chart in Excel today – what a rigmarole.
• Anyone want the Balboa Turkey Trot results in an excel spreadsheet? Let me know. Just finished import.
• 2nd day in a proper job, I phoned dad for Excel help. He’s just emailed me for the same. We both feel the significance of this moment. #W2tF
• I am the Ric Flair of Word and Excel! And maybe the Al Snow of PowerPoint?!
• you’re talking to the girl who made EXCEL CHARTS to help get the items for the Tournesol for FFXII. You have a life, I don’t! XD

Continuing Education

• We’re going to be staring at an excel spreadsheet for the next hour in this class…it’s only been 20 mins and someone’s already asleep
• it’s shocking to me how many teachers don’t use/know Excel, it’s so powerful and useful (not to mention so old!)
• Today is the first day teaching excel to a group. Why did i have this stupid idea?

I Don’t Want to Know

• Satan will take the form of Excel spreadsheet cell G-14 today and refuse to assume the proper formatting.
• Overheard this in the elevator: "I’ve got a girlfriend and nothing to show for it but some phone calls and a couple of excel spreadsheets."

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P.S. I don’t have Turkey Trot results, but you can use this template for a Daily Walking Record.

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Millions of entries, thousands of rows, too many files. Sometimes Excel chokes on the numbers and sometimes it shocks us with its powers.

And I’ve had those pivot table brain cramps, but have never run into male and female cells.

Take a Nap

• productivity would improve by 15% minimum if Office 2007 was capable of not crashing at the simplest graph & excel integration into ppt.
• Five Excel docs of at least 130 rows each plus fourteen columns plus three sheets equals I’m taking a nap and I hate tables
• Just accidentally opened up 20 Excel files and 6 PDFs at once. This is the computer equivalent of sneezing and farting at the same time.
• My work computer just told me it’s 110% done with the update I installed. All I did was open Microsoft Excel…?

This Is Shocking

• Amazing how I don’t even blink anymore when a 120k+ row Excel spreadsheet lands in my inbox
• Entrepreneur Mag: don’t make people wade thru a grotesque excel with 37 tabs. Summarize. Use English. Promote understanding. (Brad Feld)
• Excel is absolutely obliterating MATLAB at data processing right now, and for half a million entries. This is shocking to me.

Pivot Cramps

• Reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." Hoping NOT to induce a cramp on the left side & destroy ability to do Excel pivot tables.
• I believe" PivotTable" is a registered trademark. "Pivot table" is not, but still very much synonymous with Excel.

Excel Question of the Day

• #Excel Question: If I have a row where each cell is either Male or Female is there an easy way to make Excel total the amount of each?

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P.S. To count specific values, you could summarize the data in a pivot table, or use the COUNTIF function.

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It’s Monday, so we’re back to work in Excel, complaining about our bosses, clients and homework assignments. That student might be in for a shock though, if he does become self-employed. Can he really avoid Excel?

Even Tiger Woods was mentioned in the Excel tweets. That’s a sign that he’s becoming successful!

Sadly Lacking

• Sometimes, it is just easier to do something for clients than explain to them how to do it themselves. Especially in Excel.
• my boss at work is like an Excel Yoda, but taller, less green and sadly lacking in comedy speech defect.
• am trying to decipher what my boss did to the excel spreadsheet i’m supposed to update. heh.

My Bad

• Our professor just told us not to touch anything in the Excel sheet he posted. Apparently he’s unfamiliar with "Undo" and "Don’t Save".
• The farther in to this Excel course I get, the more I want to scream "Screw this!" and just be self-employed :/
• I should probably have gone over EXCEL a little earlier than 12 hrs before my physics lab final… My bad.
• Making a test using excel so every kid gets a different set of questions. CHEATERS!!!
• Time for assignment that’s due this Friday. Excel pivot table on North American mushrooms. Thrilling data mining exercise indeed.

Stage Names

• Thinking of taking a Tiger Woods-style stage name appropriate to consulting. Maybe Malcolm Excel? Or Slideshow Bob

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P.S. If Tiger Woods wants to organize his tee off times in Excel, he can use my sample workbook: Assign TeeOff Times

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It’s Sunday – a day to relax with your family, or a nice Excel workbook. In today’s Excel tweets, people are helping their parents, and debating whether working in Excel is heaven or hell.

Family Time

• Just received a "helpdesk" call from my mom. Seems she hit Ctrl-P on an Excel spreadsheet without setting a range. DoSed her printer.
• Just learned that my parents have an Excel spreadsheet that tells them what TV shows to watch, the times and what shows to tape….wow.
• Still have 2 finalize my Christmas Excel worksheet. 2 much 2 keep track of w our big extended families. Gotta stay in budget. At least try!

The Office Family

• Just discovered that MS-Acess is inferior to Excel in data analysis capabilities! No wonder it is a freeby with MS Office
• Yeah, it is one of the most abused applications. Excel… Word for users that are too stupid to use tables and forms.

Heaven or Hell

• In Excel financial analysis hell. Given my applied math undergrad, and my MBA / Finance, actually loving life right now . . . #dontjudgeme
• I am in whiteboard heaven right now. Frameworks, Pivot Tables, and Diagrams.. what am I creating? my CV! That’s right i said pivot table. 😛

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P.S. For help with Christmas planning you can download my free Christmas Planner template.

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Finally, it’s the weekend – time for some Excel fun and games. I’m not sure why an Excel party would be adult only. Maybe that’s because of all the swearing that can occur when the formulas don’t work.

And Excel is manly? Who knew? But it’s nice to see people spelling colour correctly. 😉

Excel-lent Entertainment

• Although I think "What speadsheet software came first, Excel, Lotus 123, or VisiCalc?" eliminated more… only 8 mob winners with that one!
• That’s a shame – all the previous version of Excel had games built in to "pass the time" but Microsoft don’t do them anymore
• Come to "Excel Adult Holiday Party" Friday, December 18 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
• Setlist on cellphone’s excel: check. Ironic hipster t-shirt: check. Vicks inhaler: check. Major traffic en route to gig: check.
• i can’t be bothered writing complicated code for an excel spreadsheet, i just hope everyone turns up to bowl on the weekend

Artistic Endeavours

• Its tough being an artist when the final decisions get made by people whose greatest ventures in design was 2 colour code their excel sheets
• I’m with you on the font – I tend to go for lighter more girly colours – nice juxtaposition against manly excel 😉
• What was unclear about do not change anything shaded in green in this Excel file?

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P.S. In Excel 2002 and later versions, you can change the colour of worksheet tabs.

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It’s Black Friday in the USA. In Canada, our closest equivalent shopping experience is Boxing Day, on December 26th. We buy piles of half-priced Christmas cards, wrapping paper, and ornaments, then store them away. By next Christmas, we can’t remember where they are, so we go out and buy new stuff. Very economical.

Anyway, here are some Black Friday Excel tweets. They’re not all shopping related, but there are some black days when you’re working with Excel. And if you buy something from China today, be very careful when you open the invoice.

Leftover Pie

• wow, I had to create an Excel spreadsheet just to figure out who was taking what leftovers home with them Good think I live and breath Excel
• Trying to put together a chart in Excel…why can’t I remember how to do it, and why does it keep coming out as a square pie chart?!?
• I’m making ugly pie charts in excel… I bet you wish you were me

Black Friday

• STUPID. I opened an excel doc from China (invoice for my BJD) and ended up with malware that SPAMMED EVERY FRIEND ON FACEBOOK WITH CRAP.
• there is nothing more frustrating than watching someone incompetent use Excel.
• I get so nervous when Excel asks me if I want to save changes and I KNOW I didn’t touch it.. CHANGE it Microsoft!!! PLEASE!!
• How many times do I have to have this conversation? Me: "you can’t find find your excel spreadsheet?Let me see. Ok,1st step:close out Word."

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P.S. For more information on Pie Charts, and better ways to show your data, read Jon Peltier’s article,  Exploded Pie Chart Replacement.

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Excel helps you prepare for the holidays, and it gives you plenty to be thankful for. Well, most of the time.

Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re celebrating today, and welcome to the Thanksgiving 2009 edition of Excel Twitters.

Thanksgiving Break

• My wife has created an excel spreadsheet for her thanksgiving meal preparation. This feast is going to be epic!
• My thanksgiving break: transforming 13 excel docs, two sheets a piece, into three word docs, fully formatted, checked, and filled in.
• Just totally geeked out in Excel. Happy Thanksgiving to me!!!
• Checkout Findout Thanksgiving Day’s Date for Any Year [Excel Formulas] http://bit.ly/6SdJ61
• Planning Thanksgiving remotely. Excel spreadsheets, speaker phone, and turkey calculators.

Give Thanks

• I need to make an Excel spreadsheet of friends in town for the holidays and when I can see them.
• I am a freaking genius. Taught myself a simple Excel trick and using it make a major error-preventing improvement on our record keeping 🙂
• Turns out I am smarter than the spreadsheet, but not much.Gave myself 15 min to solve it in SQL, then checked my ego and used Excel formula.

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Let’s not save all the Excel Twitter posts for one day a week. I think we need them more often, in smaller batches. So, here’s an interesting collection for today.

You read these, while I try to remember where everything is in the library. Or maybe I’ll just cry in the bathroom.

Frustrating!

• Anyway, I just finished helping Mom with her Excel homework. Omg I wanna cry. Old people should not use Excel.. It was so frustrating!
• Every time I have to spend time using Excel I end up with paper, pencil and calculator next to me. I may be irredeemably analogue.
• Spent almost all day trying to outsmart Excel. Finally nailed down the right formula at 4:45. Now I won’t have to think about it all night.
• If u dont find me @ my desk its because Excel pivot tables & the "wrap text" option made me burst into tears and Im crying in the bathroom.

Mindblowing!

• The graphs I just created in Excel are so mindblowing, they’ll probably wind up in the Smithsonian as an important moment in human history.
• Visited library and now taking tour. Uhh no automated system/catalogue. Use excel and one woman knows in her head where everything is 🙂

What Do You Think?

• Looking 4 more helpful comments on our simple Excel Carbon Footprint Calc. Tell us what you think http://is.gd/52DN9
• My friend in finance wants to make better looking spreadsheets. Is there an Elements of Style for Excel? Guidance on spreadsheet design?

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P.S. For guidance on spreadsheet design, you could try:

• Spreadsheet Check and Control 
• Professional Excel Development (2nd Edition)

Any other suggestions?

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Do your Excel files use all 1 million rows? Do any of your calculations take 46 hours? Some people are really pushing Excel to the limits in Twitter this week. Others, perhaps the smart ones, are just dancing and drinking champagne.

And now that I think about it, I’d like to know why the vertical alignment defaults to Bottom too. I can’t think of a good reason.

A is for Apple

• Apple sent me the skankiest Excel sheet order form to complete in response to my web order for Snow Leopard licences. Yuck! + missed off UK!
• In 1985 people like KPMG bought Macs just so they could run Excel. Now it’s awful… So much for progress.
• Considering class action lawsuit against Microsoft for misrepresenting Excel for Mac as actually *being* Microsoft Excel.

Living Dangerously

• Anyone have a simple way to delete duplicates on a 150K+ Excel spreadsheet without losing grasp on sanity? Anyone? I thought not. blah.
• Excel is stupidly overrated. It’s the software equivalent to the Cheesecake Factory.
• Dare I open one more Excel spreadsheet? I already have 21 open…. Ah – why not. I like to live dangerously.
• Spilled champagne on my laptop last night. Luckily it still boots this morning; I have some heavy stats work in Excel to do.

Feeling Unfulfilled

• Excel crashes everytime I try and make a pie chart. The same with word. How am I meant to do my report now?
• In trying to figure out how to do charts in excel and its hurting my head! I feel like an old person
• 3 days of extensive Excel modeling boiled down to 12 values on a chart. It got a "OK" but "needs work" from the GM. I kinda feel unfulfilled

All in the Family

• My Dad’s earnest but messy spreadsheet of wines he’s tried. Good to know that my Excel "skills" came about honestly http://twitpic.com/pyekn
• just got off the phone coaching my mom in how to move columns up in excel. took like 5 minutes to explain. lol. i love her though.
• I’ll help your dad with his BB if you’ll explain to my mom – again – how folders work. And Word. And Excel. And Outlook.
• Did I really just get a Thanksgiving dinner excel spreadsheet email from my MIL??

Formatting Features

• Is the page layout view in Excel useful to anyone?? I highly doubt it.
• (rant) Why would Excel have default cell vert align set to "Bottom"? Just to annoy me and make me change it for _each_ spreadsheet???
• It’s Saturday, but that doesn’t stop me getting excited about kb shortcuts for excel now does it? Ctrl + _ removes borders in excel.

Stuck in Class

• In Math Class, making graphs with Microsoft Excel. I am reminded of Murray from Flight of the Conchords and his ‘friends graph’.
• It took me 2 hours to do ONE excel spreadsheet, and there are 3 due at midnight! i guess I’ll just take a 33 here. Dammit.
• I spent an hour trying to find a flaw in my excel hw…only to discover the teacher gave us the wrong answer to check against :-/
• Oh toto, we are definitely not in kansas anymore. Need an excel tutor. Will pay in food and hugs.

VBA Love…and Hate

• No wonder i couldn’t figure out macros in excel… you need to enable the developer tab in the ribbon!
• It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was Excel (with Macros).
• On Excel VBA Source. Love Excel, hate Microsoft. It’s like falling in love with a member of the BNP.

New and Improved

• I suggest if you’re doing 46 hour calcs using Excel, strapping on a cluster is like adding a rocket to a tricycle: http://bit.ly/2fuVwz
• oooh Excel 2010 can do #sparklines! I am reaaally excited about this. I might actually "up"grade from Office 2003 for that!
• Not sure why Excel gave us 1M rows but doesn’t have the capacity to let us use them. Every time I try to sort by cell color it freezes.
• Office 2010 just won me over with the simplest feature. You can copy a table from the web and paste it to excel, which didn’t work in 2007.

The Office Genius

• coworker just saw this from excel: "damage so extensive, we are not able to save your work." yikes! don’t think he’d appreciate me laughing
• I learned 2 things at work today: 1 excel does whatever it chooses to do 2 my office is just the right size to dance to ‘shes like the wind’
• The problem with coming in late to the division meeting is you miss the inspirational YouTube video and catch the excel report…
• Never mind all the hugely complex maths I do all day, my boss thinks I’m a genius because I know how to UNHIDE in Excel. :-/

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Flight of the Bumblebee, Excel haiku, quadratic calculators – there were some high class Excel tweets this week. Of course, there were some not-so-high class tweets too – wiggly lines, insanity by excel and yelling at homework.

But don’t worry if your balances are off by $100 or so, you probably have different versions of Excel!

No Sharing in Excel

• Note to self; Never ever EVER use excel workbook sharing EVER AGAIN.
• Trying to populate an excel spreadsheet from conflicting, inaccurate, incomplete data sources …. Arrghhhh
• Alright … it took 4 days and about 50 hours of work, but this stupid Excel sheet is finally done! Could have done it in .NET within 3 hrs.
• When I close my eyes it’s like the "Flight of the Bumblebee" sequence from Fantasia, only Excel spreadsheet cells instead of piano keys.

Chart Problems

• scours the net looking for any info on how to fix Excel 2007 so that it doesn’t forget that a given workbook has names for its chart sheets.
• Injury: 20+ tabs of carefully named excel graphs inexplicably renamed chart 1, chart 2, etc. Insult: Excel help asks me to be facebook fan.
• Bar charts that don’t start at 0 often have a wiggly line on the y-axis. What’s that called/how do I get one on MS Excel?

Insanity By Excel

• I talk to myself when I’m doing analysis in Excel. Problem is, I’m at one long table with about four random people who prob think I’m crzy.
• Work #haiku of the day: Export Contacts Fail / Hurls the excel data out / No rhyme or reason.
• Excel is 24 years old. Why are we still calling them workbooks? Who does spreadsheets on paper? What spreads? Acoustic guitar.
• Is "insanity by Excel" a reasonable alibi?

Top Formulas

• I think the subtotal() function in Excel has to be one of the top formulas. Essential for any calculated filtered content.
• I love it when you input a circular reference in Excel. It totally freaks out.
• autofilters and the subtotal funtion – I am in Excel heaven
• Is it wrong to use Excel’s randbetween(1,9) function for the table arrangements at our wedding?!

So Much Order

• i know i’m a dork, but i love working in Excel. 🙂 All the rows & columns & formulas. So much order. Ahhhh
• Proud of nerd auditor accomplishment: managed to compress a 10799 line excel workbook into 726 lines 😀
• halfway through!! miracle. Microsoft Access does everything Excel can but only in ways that are harder and that make you feel more stupid.
• thank goodness for excel data validation. i will no longer tolerate the screwing up of my created spreadsheets!

Refresher Course

• Prof basically told us that to get 100% on some questions on the final, we need to find a way to sneak out and use Excel. (ie. Impossible)
• Will attempt to finish the Excel refresher course tonight and hope I don’t get any dirty looks from anyone at work tomorrow. dun dun dun…
• I. HATE. EXCEL. SO. MUCH. I am fairly positive I have never YELLED at my homework before. Until now. Stupid tables. Stupid formulas. Stupid.
• How many PhDs does it take to export an address list to an Excel spreadsheet?

Inappropriate Use

• Is the inappropriate use of Excel spreadsheets the cause of the financial crisis? http://bit.ly/14JWFA
• First time I ever use Excel seriously and I put in a functioning quadratic calculator. I learn fast.
• You know you’re a hopeless nerd when you set up an Excel spreadsheet with weightings and conditional formatting to help you buy a car.
• My wife just told me that my kids are using the toyrus website to build an excel spreadsheet for their christmas lists. Loving my geek kids.

Analyze It Intently

• Just asked someone to export her works table as excel. She made an image of it and stuck it on a spreadsheet. Sigh
• I love looking at Excel sheets with tons of numbers and having no idea where the numbers came from. But my dept is up!!!
• Coworker: I got $456,890. We are a hundred dollars off.Boss of me: It’s OK, I have a different version of Excel than you do.
• Tips on how to look busy: print out an Excel spreadsheet with lots of info and walk around analyzing it intently.

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Hmmm. “Boaring but neccisary.” Perhaps that tweeter should be doing spelling tutorials, instead of Excel. Or maybe they could create an Excel file of swear words, where spelling isn’t so important.

And if anyone asks you how to insert an Excel sheet into Word, you can refer them to Shauna Kelly’s Word tips website, for that and other useful tutorials.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I posted a collection of Excel-themed tweets, so I hope you enjoy these. And remember, bosses like charts.

Please Help

• I spent all day working on a huge excel spreadsheet this week & then pressed "don’t save" when shutting down. nearly wept!
• Trying to make three totally different spreadsheet match. Excel shouldn’t be guesswork, but this is.
• Friends: Am currently trapped in the library by an evil Excel spreadsheet. Far from any vending machine. Stomach inverting. Please help.

The Art of Charts

• I know, I love Excel but some things do suck. Gantt charts are ok though, especially if it looks like your doing loads of work.
• That’s because Excel is trying to tell you that pie charts are the Comic Sans of the graphical display of quant information world.
• Learning to create charts in Excel. Surprisingly, not a life skill taught to people who major in poetry. Let me be a lesson to you, kids!
• After putting up some dynamic charts and calling them dashboard, it dawns upon me that its more of an art than excel skills.

Emotionally Invested

• It’s also amazing how emotionally invested you can become in a single Excel spreadsheet!
• just got really excited about an excel sheet i made. then realized how sad that was. now i’m depressed (with an awesome spreadsheet)
• Wow I just got handed a spreadsheet which is pretty much an application in itself, had no idea you could do this with excel.
• Watching a real expert manipulate an Excel spreadsheet… it’s almost performance art. Waou.

Excel-ent Comedy

• I can see Rikers Island out my office window,very inspiring during this heavy excel spreadsheet session .typing in Cells looking at Cells
• i’m offering 5 dollars for someone to come over and do microsoft excel spreadsheet for me. i’ll even come pick you up. PLEASE.
• Bill Gates and Montgomery Burns have launched a new spreadsheet application for the Nuclear power industry, it will be called ‘Excel-ent’

Boaring But Neccisary

• I am doing online tutorials for excel, boaring but neccisary
• I just experienced 30 minutes of training on how to format an Excel spreadsheet. Shouldn’t even the lowest common denominator know that?
• Completed Exel training & am now an Excel greenbelt! I can break a thin piece of wood in half with my spreadsheet. Beware!
• Ok, you’re Masters students in a library program – you should know how to find different sheets in an EXCEL workbook. COME ON!!!!!!!!

Pivot Table Fetish

• also, I’m a little concerned that my husband has a pivot table fetish. more concerned that he chose to reveal it to me at my parents’ house.
• Apparently, someone ASKED for this pivot table training. For the record, it was NOT me.
• It’s okay. If I were in charge of the world, I’d create a way to calculate median on an excel pivot table. Just saying.

This Scares Me

• Peeking through her fingers at her content audit spreadsheet. It’s like excel went out, got drunk and slept with a cheap search engine.
• Hm. Someone just sent me an Excel spreadsheet full of localised swear words, and I’ve no idea why.
• If I knew all it would take for my kid to try tomatoes was a dandy Excel chart, I’d have done it sooner! http://is.gd/3P1Bs
• My wife made an Excel spreadsheet to track McDonalds Monopoly pieces. This scares me and explains our cholesterol issues.

Macro Evolution

• I just wrote 20 lines of vba code to replace around 1/2 million formulas in my Excel finance workbook, awesome.
• Macro evolution is what happens when you send an unprotected Excel spreadsheet to guys in the field. But the changes are never beneficial.
• how much excel workbook coding does it take to go insane? I must be pretty close.

Bosses Like Charts

• people running at work…surely nothing in accountancy is urgent? ‘I’ve lost my calculator!’/’My Excel spreadsheet won’t print on A3!’
• I’ve learned something in my 10-year career as an Excel guru: Bosses like charts.
• Coworker: "Do you guys know if you can insert an excel spreadsheet into word?" Me: I dunno, take the time it took 2 walk over here and try.
• i just taught a ‘senior associate’ how to insert a row in an Excel spreadsheet. if i find out she makes more than I do, we have a problem.

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I’m not doing weekly Twitter posts any longer, because of all the spam in Twitter. However, here are a couple of recent Excel related tweets with interesting links. Who knew that you could do knitting with Excel?

• Create your own lace knitting chart with Excel. http://bit.ly/aKCqU
• Forget Excel: 14 Online Spreadsheet Applications http://bit.ly/cIpMO#mb

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Are Excel nerds Rock Stars? Should we hear applause after each brilliant performance? People were celebrating the small Excel victories in Twitterville this week. Speaking of celebrations, it’s Ken Puls’ birthday today, and Nick Hodge is getting married this weekend, so best wishes to them.

I’m not a historian, so can’t vouch for the accuracy of the Obama claim in this weeks tweets, but it’s interesting anyway. Meanwhile, other dads were causing Excel problems for their long suffering children. And I’m not sure who’s making those poisonous bacon claims, but Mike Alexander would be my first suspect.

Finally, if you were one of the winners in the Summer Giveaway for Excel Nerds, you should have received an email from me. If not, please email me

Father Knows Best

• It’s time for bed. Just gave my father a Microsoft Excel tutorial by phone. I’m tired!
• My dad stopped by for a simple Excel question…..2 hours later we finished
• Went to Dad’s for the annual printing and reset of an Excel spreadsheet. How he ended up with two sons in the computer industry is beyond me
• Funky visual effect when this macro is run due to VBA being finicky with selection requirements shouldn’t be there, but Dad (boss) likes it

Off the Charts

• Goddamnit Microsoft, why did you deem it necessary to make the chart interface for Excel 2007 vastly different from 03 but somehow worse?
• O, Excel. Nobody wants to add an axes label after creating a chart. Thanks for making that completely inscrutable. MATLAB will let me. Pfff!
• Can anyone make a Mac graphing utility – for designers, mind you, none of that mathy stuff – that a) works and b) has options like Excel?

Rousing Applause

• I want to be a musician so I can get accolades after each of my tasks. Excel spreadsheet? Clap clap! RFP? Rousing applause!
• U know u’re an accounting nerd when u figure out how to do smthing new in excel and jump out of your seat pump ur fist and scream YES!
• Grace>Excel. Successfully fixing a spreadsheet led to a private dance party – a kind of joy that copying/holepunching just can’t provide
• Cowoker & I behaved as if we just won the lottery when we managed to get numbers from 2 different Excel models match each other. Oh, yeah!

Small Steps

• see, I told you. Excel triggers it. Its a specific cell when used as a SUM, emits poisonous bacon particles
• Excel, I love you / I do all the logistics / You do all the math. #haiku
• Obama becomes first US president to use the word “spreadsheet” in a speech. One small step for man, one giant leap for Excel.
• 95% of the stuff you might want to accomplish in MS Access you can do in Excel with 10% the effort.

No Problem

• Create a price-list in excel for spare parts for the Robinson 44 and 22. No problem, I said – which was before I saw the 14.000 part-list.
• There is something utterly sweet about your man offering to create formulae for your wedding seating chart spreadsheet. I hate Excel.
• Doing an excel spreadsheet to list my inventory of all music gear and insturments, bordem or maturity?

Re-inventing the Wheel

• Excel file size creep? Stand back, this is a job for my poor grasp of vba.
• #worstDevMemory Finding a comment in the VBA “‘This will require the server to be rebooted”
• Wrote Excel VBA Add-In to clean non-printing characters out of my data. Wonder how many times that wheel has been re-invented.

Rock Stars

• Will be reciting Excel equations in my sleep tonight. My colleague taught me so much today! My bff said “Excel could raise a child”.
• I have a excel spreadsheet i will splash across the screen when the boss stomps past. god help me if she doesnt wear her boots!
• After looking at excel sheets since 10am..my conclusion. I am soo gonna work my ass off at magic cause real jobs aint my thing!
• Can we stop using the term “Rock Star” to describe professional capacity? Formatting an Excel worksheet doesn’t = headlining an arena tour.

What did we learn in Twitter this week? Excel can improve your health, or make you feel like a time-poor hack. Good thing a sense of humour will help you get through the week, even if your 17-year-old self wouldn’t recognize you. And no, that tired and cranky tweeter wasn’t me!

Now remember, don’t let your kung-fu get rusty, and keep pimping that Excel shiz.

Health Benefits

• dude, my hand muscles are going to be so RIPPED from all of this excel work. HUGE.
• I’m surprised $MS hasn’t tried marketing excel as a hangover remedy based on their past fails.
• fighting off the urge to fall right asleep – who knew excel formulae had such a lulling effect? This could the cure to insonmnia!
• Microsoft Excel … keeping those of us with OCD happy for more than 20 years.

Stupid Questions

• Why does rotating text in Excel make it look like it was produced by the unabomber’s typewriter?
• I am tired and cranky and working on an excel spreadsheet. I wouldn’t ask me any stupid questions right now.
• When am I going to learn to format my excel sheets after I am done instead of 20 billion times during?

Screwing Things Up

• OH.. was that *me* who pasted tattoo artist Stephen Huie’s URL into my boss’ excel spreadsheet and then EMAILED it to him? yes, yes it was.
• Screwing things up in Excel.. I thought I was an Excel genius.. So difficult to admit i’m not… Still need to work it out tho…
• Over-complex accounting spreadsheet baffles time-poor hack who previously thought he knew a bit about Excel…
• I am resigning my membership to the “MS Excel Experts Alliance” since I couldn’t sort a sheet correctly last night. lol 1 screw up & ur out.

An Acquired Taste

• No consolation I know, but I made a rather splendid buffet/MS Excel pie-chart joke today in a meeting. No-one laughed.
• Today wrote the line “Sexit Sub” when coding VBA… and laughed. I need to get out more.
• Excel: did you hear the one about the sum that broke the rules? It was put in a cell!

No Limit

• There is no limit to the ways the human imagination can misuse an Excel spreadsheet. I mean, it’s a frickin’ art form.
• before ms excel – guest post by Carolyn Fraser http://bit.ly/QBcdM
• Great download-able (Excel) list of 415 Museums on Twitter prepared by @MuseumMarketing http://ow.ly/hRJc
• How much are your memories worth?…http://bit.ly/BKToD theres even an Excel spreadsheet!?!?

VBA Skills

• good grief, my excel kung-fu is rusty as hell. remember when i could do VBA? yeah, me neither, apparently.
• I just entered the Code For Excel and Outlook blog contest #cfeao http://tinyurl.com/mlr7mm
• Nesting IF’s and VBA I do not how I got here! tip dont volunteer to streamline an excel spreadsheet, at work!, I am in cell A5998-help!!
• Just finished my interview. The guy said basically that I may be too business analytical for the needs of his vba reporting. What?

Office Politics

• What’s the best way to tell your colleague that Microsoft Excel meant it to be pronounced “pih-vut” and not “pie-vatt” table?
• What you don’t want to hear in part of a conversation about a broken excel spreadsheet, is your name mentioned as a person who could help…
• Late night PPT creations and Excel formulations…my 17 year old self would not even know me. Hello Corporate Canada.

Just Me?

• I love the smell of excel in the morning.
• In Excel, does everyone else immediately start singing Run DMC as soon as you hit the “wrap text” radio button? Just me?
• had a great week pimping that excel shiz

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