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David Gainer writes an Excel blog for Microsoft. He often has guest posts written by insiders from Microsoft exposing cool excel secrets.

Two in particular I have noticed recently are these.

Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization discusses how to create an intraday time series chart.

Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour. This is actually fairly easy to do but unfortunately isn’t very obvious. A typical scenario is you own a restaurant that takes phone orders and you want to reduce the wait time for customers placing an order. This is influenced by a number of factors but a big one is the number of people calling at the same time. As such, you would want to staff your phone lines with more people during the busy times. The key here is to determine when the busy times are and by how much.

Eric Patterson, a program manager on the Excel team discusses applying pattern fills to chart data points and includes a sample add-in for this purpose.

In Excel 2007, the interface for applying Pattern fills to chart elements has been removed in favour of the interface for applying Picture and Texture fills. Charts formatted with pattern fills in previous versions of Excel will retain and display the pattern fills when opened in Excel 2007.

This article starts off quite simply and is useful for those who just want to use pattern fills in charts - eg for black and white printing. However he also goes very in depth to the point of providing the code to create your own add-in to do this.

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