Working with inventory can sometimes seem like a huge insurmountable job. Determining how well each part is performing and forecasting when you’re going to run out of inventory for each part is not only really difficult but it’s nearly impossible. There are way too many variables that are at play especially if you’re not working off of contracts with your customers. That being said however, there are some ways that you can at least track and review your historical sales and usage trends for your inventory. This will at least allow you to at a very basic level understand what’s actually been happening in the market in the months leading up to today.
It’s no secret that being a power user in Excel has its perks. Research shows that users who truly know how to use the power of Excel can potentially increase their salary by up to nearly $4,000 per year (dependent on their career). If you don’t believe me, have a look at this awesome infographic from Skilledup showing you how you can benefit from learning Excel. (more…)
It has been far too long since I last posted on my blog. Between removing the popcorn ceilings throughout our entire upstairs of our home and just the general craziness of the holiday season, I’ve had very little time to do anything. One of my goals in 2015 will be to try and post once a week to my blog. That seems like such an easy feat but for some reason I always seem to struggle to stay consistent in getting the content out on such a reserved schedule. That all being said, I’m excited to get back into the swing of things and today I’ll be showing you how you can use the option button form control in Excel to control your dashboard number formatting. (more…)
When it comes to Excel, my favorite topic and the thing I have the most fun with is building Excel dashboards. The truth is, a dashboard is like a picture, it’s worth a 1000 words. You can LITERALLY at a glance determine the health of your business by simply plugging in your raw data into a dashboard and then getting some output that will either tell you the good news or the bad news. That being said, Chandoo has come out with a pretty slick product that allows you to dump pretty much any set of KPIs (key performance indicators) into the dashboard and have a beautiful looking finished product dashboard that summarizes your numbers. Today however, I want to look at 11 unexpected things that I learned from dissecting Chandoo’s Excel dashboard template workbook. (more…)
The large formula is an excellent tool that I haven’t really used that much until just recently. The beauty about it is that you can search through a large set of data, and identify the first, second, third, fourth …..Nth largest number/value in any given data set for a column/field. When I started to really think about this, I realized that this could be a great tool (perhaps even the secret ingredient) to building detailed dashboards showing the top 3, 5 or 10 records for pretty much any data set that you could think of. In this post, you are going to use the large formula first to identify the top 3 records of your entire data set, then you’ll use the index formula in combination with the match formula to identify the corresponding values that will make up your entire record. We will then have a look at how you can find the top 3 records based on a certain criteria within your data set. Here you will also use the index match formula using multiple criteria to get your corresponding values to complete each of the top 3 records.
How do you make the best of a sparkline in Excel? Well I’ve decided to answer that question in this post. Excel sparklines are ideal for quickly plotting trends especially when you are looking at a data set / series or a report. There are several features that you may or may not already know about, but I will review the top 5 things that I feel will help you make the best use out of Excel sparklines.
