Excel Zoom

Excel, by default comes with a standard pre-selected color palette, which is useful, however there are times when those standard colors just won’t do.

It’s possible that your company’s colors are not included in the standard colors found in Excel.  If you’d like to use them in your workbook, you’ll need to change the standard colors.

In order to do this, select Tools | Options | Colors tab (in pre-2007 versions of Excel), or Microsoft Office Button | Excel Options | Save | Colors (in Excel 2007). 

Next, click on the color you wish to change, and click Modify.  You can choose from one of the colors on the Standard tab, or you can click the Custom tab if you know the RGB or HSL format of the color you wish to use. 

Repeat these steps as often as necessary, then when you return to Excel, you can change the fill, font, and chart colors in your workbook to your new custom colors.

Microsoft Excel is jam packed with cool useful features that tend to go unused by most users, simply because they don’t know how to use them, or even that they exist.  One of these features is Excel’s Goal Seek tool.

First, some background on what it does.  Goal Seek is essentially the answer to every middle school aged kid’s math test word problem.  It is best used when you know the answer to the problem you’re trying to solve, but don’t know all the inputs.

For example, a simple word problem might be “You have 432 sheets of paper to give out to a class of 36 students.  How many sheets of paper does each student get.”  Well you know that 36 multiplied by something will give you 432, but you don’t know what that number is.  You could divide 432 by 36 to get the answer, but let’s assume that isn’t possible right now.  With Goal Seek, you need several things:

• An answer expressed as a formula, in this case 432 is equal to 36 times something.  Don’t worry, the result of the formula doesn’t have to equal 432 yet.  That’s the magic of Goal Seek.
• You need one part of the equation, in this case 36.

To start, type the following into your spreadsheet in the cells indicated.

Next, open Goal Seek (Tools | Goal Seek, or Data tab on the Excel 2007 ribbon | What If Analysis | Goal Seek).

You are now going to be asked for three things. 

1. Set Cell: this is the reference to the cell that contains your formula, in which you want Excel to produce your answer of 432.  In our example it should be A3.  Note: the Set Cell MUST contain a formula or function.
2. To Value: this is the value you want in your Set Cell (A3).  The value here should be 432.
3. By Changing Cell: Since we know that the formula in cell A3 is correct, and the value of 36 in cell A1 is correct, we want Excel to produce the answer of 432 by changing cell A2.  Type A2 in this box.  Note: the Changing Cell MUST contain a value.
4. Click OK.

After clicking OK, Excel will attempt to find a solution to the equation.  Once it does, it will enter the missing number in cell A2 and your formula should now equal 432.

Obviously this is a basic example, and doesn’t use Goal Seek’s capabilities to their fullest extent.  Let’s take another example that looks at a company’s sales by product to get their desired level of revenue.

XYZ Company makes four different products, Product A, Product B, Product C, and Product D.  The company can produce 1,000, 750, 500, and 100 of each product respectively.  The products also sell for $15, $20, $35, and $50 respectively.  Their maximum revenue for products produced that month, therefore is as follows:

Now say the company feels that their underdog, Product D, could be producing much more.  They also want their revenues to be 60,000.  How many more of Product D will they need to produce?

To figure this out, run Goal Seek just like before, except this time, the “Set Cell” is cell D6, “To Value” is 60,000, and the “By Changing Cell” is cell B5.  After clicking OK, you’ll notice that Excel has changed the value in cell B5 to 250, indicating that you will need to increase production of Product D to 250 units from 100 in order to have revenues of $60,000, assuming everything else remains the same.

OK, I know the tag-line for this website is “…because it’s more than just a calculator”.  Of course this is in reference to the almost endless number of functions that Excel can calculate when compared to a standard calculator.  That isn’t to say though that Excel can’t calculate things just as well as a standard calculator.

For example, when balancing a checkbook, you could write out your bank balance and manually add or subtract the deposits and checks that haven’t cleared the bank yet.  Or, you could type your bank balance into Excel, type the list of checks and deposits and have Excel do the math for you.

You could also add a list of numbers together in one cell the opposite way from how you would calculate them on a calculator.  If you have the following list of numbers: 8, 17, 49, 32, 19, you would add them on a calculator by typing 8+17+49+32+19= to produce 125.  In Excel, the equals sign is on the opposite side of the equation.  You simply type =8+17+49+32+19 hit Enter and the cell will display the result, 125.

You can do this with all the familiar operators found on a calculator (add, subtract, multiply, and divide), as follows.

So, while Excel is more than just a calculator, it can still perform various functions like a calculator.

For all of you out there still wondering where the “File” menu is in Excel 2007 and other Office 2007 products, another twist is in store for you.  Microsoft announced earlier this week that they are planning on releasing Office 2010, which includes updates to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, SharePoint Workspace (formerly Groove 2007), and InfoPath.

In addition to the new programs, Microsoft is also introducing Office Web Applications, which compliments Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote to allow you to access your files from anywhere with an internet connection.  It also allows you to share documents with others and even gives you the ability to work simultaneously on the same document.  Further adding to their product offerings is Office Mobile, which allows you to view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on a mobile version of the software.  Email will also be easier to manage with Outlook Mobile.

OK, so enough with the Office features, what’s new in Excel 2010?

Spreadsheets can now be run in your web browser, and be published to the web via the desktop version.  The browser version does not have as many features as the desktop version, however it is an improvement over Google Spreadsheets.  Additionally, a new analytic feature is called Sparklines, which produce a visual trend of a data set over time similar to a chart, except the Sparkline is contained within a single cell.  For example, if you’re tracking monthly sales of a product, you can set a Sparkline that will show the peaks and valleys that the data produces.

One thing users of Excel 2007 (and other Office 2007 programs) who are just getting used to the new Ribbon will not have to worry about is learning another new user interface.  The ribbon should remain essentially the same as in the 2007 version, except for a few new features.

This post will get updated as I discover new features, so please bookmark it and check back often.

Using charts in Excel can be a very powerful tool when used correctly.  They can help to quickly visualize trends, and analyze results.  The charts, however are useless if the person who is looking at them can’t tell what the data is that they are trying to analyze.

Excel helps the user by inserting labels in key points to help the user identify what they are looking at.  If you have a dynamic set of data (that is, it can change and represent different different sets of data) that feeds a chart, you might not want to use Excel’s default data labels.  Luckily Excel will allow you to link certain labels to a cell in your file, which will update the label’s value each time the cell value changes.

To do this, simply click on the label so that there is a box surrounding it.  Then click in the formula bar and type “=A1″ (assuming you wish to link the label to cell A1).  Hit Enter and you’re all set!

Linking the chart’s labels is useful when, for example, you have some monthly sales information set up so that when you type “Monthly” in cell A1, it displays the data by month, and when you type “Quarterly” in cell A1 it displays it by quarter.  Essentially its the same data, just aggregated a little differently. 

Having a chart that is as dynamic as the data would be nice so that you don’t have to keep changing the chart title from “Monthly Sales Data” to “Quarterly Sales Data”, or the X-Axis label from “Monthly” to “Quarterly”, and back again each time you change the views.