I’ve been busy and not able to blog much lately, but I just go an email from Chandoo that I thought I’d share.

Chandoo is taking another round of students for his VBA classes. I’ve heard very good things about it. Here’s what Chandoo has to say:

So far, we have enrolled 180 students in to this batch. We are eager to enroll as many more as possible during next one day.

We will be closing enrollments for this on September 16 by 12 Midnight Pacific Time. Please tell your subscribers & readers about this so that they can join in time.

The course comes in 4 flavors:

• VBA Classes with Online Access – $97
  
• VBA Classes with Downloadable Access – $147
  
• Excel School + VBA Classes – $247
  
• Excel School + Dashboards + VBA Classes – $347
  

You can sign up for one of this classes by clicking this link.

(FYI, I’m hoping to be back blogging and posting again soon… things have been – well actually… continue to be – crazy! But I should be able to carve some time out of my schedule again shortly.)

• Copy the range of numbers
• Right click the destination and choose PasteSpecial
• Select Values and Subtract:

  

• Say OK and voila:

  

Now interestingly enough, if there are values in the cells, it overwrites them. If there are formulas in the cells, it subtracts them from the formulas. Kind of odd that it isn’t consistent.

(And of course, if you subtract a negative number, it turns into a positive too.)

At any rate, back to Outlook, here’s how:

• Go to the File menu and click Automatic Replies
• Check the radio button to send automatic replies
• Check the checkbox to only send during the time range

  

I set mine up to take effect 5:00 on the day I’m leaving until 5:00 of the business day before I’m back. Just click OK and you’re done! No need to worry about remembering to do it just AFTER you shut your computer down.

In addition, you can also set up a different message for those outside the organization… (What you’re seeing above is the message to anyone inside my company.0 Click the “Outside My Organization” button and set up your message there. (Notice you can also opt not to respond to anyone externally.)

You might notice that I also dragged my return by a day for those outside the organization in this case. Gives me a bit of time to catch up on the internal stuff first.

This is pretty cool stuff, and a major improvement over earlier versions. I think it would be great if I could control the time range for external messages separately as well, but hey, I can live with this for now. J

Then came 2007 which gave us the Ribbon in its place. The Ribbon consumed as much real estate as three rows of toolbars, and gave us a lot less commands one click away. The story we heard was how Microsoft was trying to make the experience easier for new users… making commands more discoverable. The revised system was supposedly more logical than all the commands buried under menus in the old structure.

To some extent, I’d agree that Microsoft accomplished their goals here. The applications are much less intimidating than they were for new/less experienced users. The issue is that it smacked the power users pretty badly. I still feel that I’m less efficient with the Ribbon than I was with the toolbar hierarchy, and I’ve written the book on how to customize the user interface. The only reason I got into ribbon customization in the first place was to try and get some of that efficiency back that we lost under the new paradigm.

Interestingly, as we can see with the copy/paste icons in Office 2010, Microsoft is starting to move toward and icon basis again, without as much text:

I wonder if this is to make it easier to port the application to other languages? I also wonder how long it will be before we start seeing a Ribbon with no text on it at all? After all, it just wastes space when you know what the commands do.

Now, here’s where I get confused… I installed Internet Explorer 9. And here’s the basic install:

This is discoverability? I’m not saying I want a full blown Ribbon here, but you can’t tell me that these two philosophies are the same? The menus are gone, granted that’s consistent, but where are the favourites that I used to be able to have one click away? I actually had to download a toolbar for it. In fact, I’ve found the lack of discoverability of controls to be so frustrating that I went and installed Firefox. Unfortunately this seems to be the new thing.

I don’t get the completely opposite directions here. In one app we’re putting in big, bloated user interfaces to be in the users faces. In the other we’re trying to remove it all and make them hunt for it. What gives?

We put out a prototype of the Dashboard report, and our Director of Golf said “This is cool. What’s the chance we could also have the events coming up over the next week listed?”

Wow, cool. This is a great thought. Combined with the weather, this makes it a forward looking document that should be really useful.

It’s not like we don’t have the information, either. We have a shared Outlook calendar that we use for recording all of our events. So it’s just a matter of getting the appointments out of the Calendar and into Excel. Easy, right? Ha!

Outlook has a weird way of storing appointments… especially when you get into recurring appointments. It seems that if you run code looking for appointments it ignores the recurring ones. Run the code to get the recurring appointments and it gives them to you, but with the date of the first recurring appointment… even if you select a recurring appointment from within a date range. (I pulled all appointments from 2011-04-04 to 2011-04-11, and was getting appointments from 2010!) Apparently Outlook doesn’t actually store the dates of the recurring appointments at all, only the first and the recurrence pattern.

After a couple of days fighting with this, (on and off,) I happened to hit Bing looking for help. Lo and behold, I found an article by Jimmy Peña that does it all! Sweet! (Thanks Jimmy!)

I had to make a very simple change to the article in order to make it work on a shared calendar, but that was it. Jimmy’s code pulls down the key pieces I needed and places it all in a nice table:

Now, what we did with it…

I really wanted something to put on the bottom of the report that looked nice, and gave the users appropriate information. I could have pulled this into a PivotTable and put it on the report, but I didn’t really like the look of it. Then I got to thinking… I like the way the slicer looks, I wonder if… So on a whim I decided to try something:

• I created a column for each type of event I wanted to display

  

• I created a PivotTable that showed the list of events
• I added a slicer off the Pivot Table for each of the event categories at the bottom of the report

So now, I have the following to place on the bottom of my Dashboard to show the team what events are upcoming over the next week (You can picture the charts and tables above that.)

I don’t think that anyone at Microsoft ever intended that someone would use slicers are the report output, but for our purposes it works.

Now, some observations here…

• I can’t get rid of the blank lines. The table formulas use “” at the end of the IF statements, but they still show in the slicers. Using NA() returns #N/A in the slicers.
• One could argue that it might be better to have these grouped by date, rather than by category. We may still do that, depending on the feedback from the team.
• It’s unfortunate that I had to link these to a PivotTable… I wish I could just create a slicer and give it a range to populate, like a chart
• Slicer formatting options are severely limited. You pretty much can choose a colour, to sort ascending/descending and if you’d like to shade unavailable options. (How about hide them all together?)

Granted, this may not be perfect for everyone, but I kind of like the use for this. It adds a bit of polish to our overall report, as the slicers are a bit more glamorous than a standard Excel table (with the rounded edges and all.)

I’m curious what you think of it.

As per my last post, I recently set up a free public Excel Help Forum on my website. I’m pleased to say that over the past week and a bit we’ve attracted 50 new users, and now have over 40 threads with over 200 total posts on the site. Not bad for 10 days!

I’ve spent a lot of time configuring different options to try and make this forum as consumable as possible for people. In addition to the basic forum functionality, some of the modifications include:

• Serious anti-spam solutions to keep the board all about questions and answers, without having to wade through garbage
• Facebook integration, for those of you who like to tell your friends what you’re doing
• RSS feeds, for those who like to keep up to date on the topics, and drop in when you see one that interests you
• Tapatalk integration, for those who want to keep up with the site on a mobile device

And those are just the big ones. There’s been a lot of tweaks under the hood to make the experience as optimal as possible, and a few others are coming soon.

The latest thing I’ve worked on is adding what I hope to be THE Excel Events Calendar on the internet…

I’d like to invite everyone to use the Calendar on the forum as a public Excel Events Calendar. If you have, or know of, an Excel event in your area, please post it for the world to see. I’d like to make this the most comprehensive Excel training calendar on the internet.

There are only 2 rules I’d like to attach to this at this point:

• Put the location of the event in the title, if applicable. The goal is that people will be able to find events that they can attend in their own backyard, worldwide.
• Only the date(s) of event should be posted. (I don’t want a post each week reminding people.) If there is a registration cutoff date, please post it in the event information.

I think if everyone observes the above, the calendar should remain relevant and helpful to everyone.

Events I would expect to see include training courses (live or online), new book release dates, conferences that deal with subject matter relevant to the users on this site. (Be it BI, SQL, Sharepoint and more, so long as it has an Excel flavour, it counts.)

If you are a trainer, teacher, publisher, or whatever, I invite you to participate. Register for the site, if you’re not already, and post your event to the Excel Event Calendar. The more up-to-date and accurate we can make this, the more our community can rely on this being the source to come to for training courses. The more that happens, the more likelihood you’ll get signups. The more signups you get, the more likely you are to want to put on more training events, and the more the users win. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle that is in all of our best interests.

Oh, and one final word on this to everyone. I am not doing this to solicit commissions, affiliate links or funding in any way. There is already enough advert links on the site. This is about people helping people in our Excel world.

I keep my OS pretty current, and installed Windows 7 SP1 as soon as it was pushed out in Windows Update. Today we go to install Microsoft’s Remote Server Administration tools so that I can connect to Hyper-V to build and manage my Virtual Machines, and it won’t install. What the hell? I get a nice little error message telling me “This update is not applicable to your computer.” Like hell it’s not!

After some searching, I found out that someone has come up with a route around this issue to get it to work correctly, which you can find here.

Microsoft has acknowledged it as an issue. In their KB’s wording: “Microsoft has confirmed this to be by design, as RSAT was designed for Windows 7 RTM version. A newer version of RSAT is slated to be released in the future.” Their advice is to uninstall SP1, install RSAT, then reinstall SP1 again. To me that sounds more dangerous than the route I went to fix it.

Personally, I don’t think this is good enough. If this is truly “by design”, then someone needs a smack upside the head. Microsoft wants people to keep their software current, and these are the exact people getting smacked!

I get that software is tough to deploy, but if the route I went is all that’s needed to fix it, surely someone could roll up a quick hotfix to release in a few hours.

In a discussion about PowerPivot yesterday, one of my friends stated that it wasn’t really useful since you couldn’t perform writeback using PowerPivot. To him this is a very important piece in the Excel budgeting process. Now, I agree that PowerPivot doesn’t give you write-back to a database, but this got me thinking… we have linked tables, so why couldn’t we create a write-back loop for a model that was built entirely in Excel? Well, we can!

To be clear here, this only works if your entire model is built in Excel and PowerPivot. You can source data from elsewhere to supplement it, but the key is that the information will be written into the PowerPivot cube as the ultimate database. I am certainly not advising anyone to toss a database in favour of a PowerPivot file, but if you don’t have a database, and want to user PowerPivot as your DB, then this could work.

Here’s how I generated a writeback scenario…

To summarize this:

• The initial step is to create a table of data in Excel, format it as a Table.
• Next, we need to link the Excel table into PowerPivot. (Create Linked Table.) This action will upload the structure and data into PowerPivot, forming the beginning of the PowerPivot database.
• The next step is that we create a PivotTable in Excel, based off the data. At this point we will have a data table in Excel, and a PivotTable based off that data in another sheet. While I haven’t tested this, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t avoid the PivotTable and just use cube functions based off the PowerPivot cube instead if you prefer. At any rate, here’s the PivotTable I set up:
• I then create a working sheet.
  • The purpose of this worksheet is to pull in the values from the PivotTable (or be populated with OLAP formulas), then allow the user to “override” the key sections. In my test, I used a bunch of GETPIVOTDATA functions to pull the values from the PivotTable (although I could easily have one with an Index/Match combination or something else too.) This section looks like as follows (notice the override cell):
  • Depending on the complexity of the model, I might also create a summary section to re-summarize all the inputs. This would also give the user a place to review for reasonableness, as well as give a nice range to use for an INDEX(MATCH(),MATCH()) combination. You can see tha the summary version uses my override, not the original PivotTable value here:

• Finally, we go back to the original data table we uploaded to PowerPivot. At this point, we need to have it read the data from our adjusted data tables. In the case of the example here, I used an Index/Match setup to read from the data table immediately above.

And now we have the ability to generate our writeback. We start at the top of the image below, where the blue circles are manual steps and the red circles are automatic.

You can download a sample of the setup I used to test this. It’s fairly simple, but it does demonstrate that it works. J

Debra did a great writeup of the =CELL function back in her 30 Excel Functions in 30 Days series. The examples work great in the client, but not the webapp. Too bad, really, as it’s a great function that can be used for a lot of things.

I don’t know how much people have played with this, but if you encounter a function that doesn’t work, post it in the comments. It would be nice to get a full list.

Pro-active Data Validation:

• Excel’s Data Validation toolset
• Form controls
• ActiveX controls
• PivotTable filters
• Slicers

Re-active Data Validation:

• Conditional formats
• Contextual formulas (IF)

So naturally, as I was trying to convert one of my web pages to use Microsoft WebApp off SkyDrive, I ran into issues. Unfortunately at this point in time, the majority of the techniques that we use for data validation in the client are not yet supported in WebApp. And yet, if we’re trying to build a web application, sanitizing the data is really important to make sure it works correctly.

I decided to convert my “Automation Evaluation” worksheet, which was intended to display how much it cost someone to do repetitive tasks over time. The overall goal of this file was to convince someone that they should pay me to automate their work, back when I was still doing consulting projects. I don’t do them any more, but I think the exercise is still worth having on the site.

In this file, it was really important to me to control the options people can select to work with for how many minutes/hours/days they spend on a task. I want the right data in there to drive my chart, yet my options are VERY limited in WebApp.

I tried the slicers, but they aren’t really built for this scenario. Set horizontally or vertically they take up way too much space. You can set them to a single column then make your user scroll down, but if you only have one option on the screen (like a combo box) then it gets awkward to figure out which option(s) are selected, and involves extra clicks. And that doesn’t even touch the “how do I return the clicked value from a slicer” issue. (I haven’t figured out how to get a value from a non-PowerPivot slicer yet.)

So this time I reached to PivotTables. I ended up making some very small tables with the options I needed and created a PivotTable that uses only the Page Field. This give me the ability to get a drop-down with pre-defined options. It works, but it does have a couple of issues:

• In the client it defaults to a “Select one item” approach and you have to check a box to allow you to select multiple items. In WebApp, it allows you to select multiple items. So I had to add a contextual formula to feed back info to the users if this happens.
• There are actually hidden rows in the worksheet to allow the Page Field to be changed. Even though the options selected always end up in the page field line, it seems to need extra space to refresh the table.

At any rate, it’s not perfect, but it seems to work. Here’s a look at the file: