Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Its been a while since i wrote an Excel only post – apologies for that. This one is all about Excel. Seeing as we are now less than 2 months away from Excel 2010 there’s a heavy focus on that. I am now using the beta on my production  development machines though still using Excel 2003 in our virtual machine development environments. Some of our clients change slower than a glacier but we need to be able to support them.

Scatter charts with PowerPivot. Converting Pivot tables to cube formulas in order to access chart types not supported by Pivot tables. Sam has linked to Robs original post.

I have often used spin controls on spreadsheets to allow users to quickly and easily change inputs that affect charts or spreadsheet results. Cell Matrix has a good set of instructions on How to add an ActiveX SpinButton control to a spreadsheet in Excel 2007.

Roy MacLean has written an article on Creating a Dynamic Combo Box List. This works in Excel 2007.

Tushar Mehta has been writing on Dick’s Daily Dose of Excel about Power Pivot. He has written 3 of a 4 part series so far on using these tools to analyse some 18 million rows of census data and represent the results in a conditionally colour formatted chart. Excel 2010 only.

• Part 1 Introduction
• Part 2 Prepping the Census Data
• Part 3 Conditional Shape Colours

I can’t wait for part 4. That is some serious computational effort and Excel 2010 can do it!

Debra Dalgleish has written an article about Creating the flag in an Excel chart. Id like to see some one do the South Korean flag!

Amit at Digital Inspiration has hinted that there is a free upgrade to Office 2010 for purchasers of Office 2007 from March 5 2010 on. We haven’t had news of this in Australia yet, but I’m hoping that it comes here too.

Jon Peltier has put up some conditional chart colouring techniques.