From the category archives:

Excel Reporting

How Monarch Makes Quick Work of Long Term Improvements

November 3, 2008

Not every process improvement task that you undertake needs to take weeks or months to accomplish. Sometimes you can genuinely produce terrific long term benefits in mere minutes. I was recently approached by someone began the conversation by saying that he needed my help to “automate a report update with some programming”. He had been [...]

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Is 80 Percent Better Than 100 Percent?

September 22, 2008

Technology blogger Robert Cringley wrote today about 80 percent solutions. “80 percent solutions … are fast, increasingly reliable, and keep the end users in the loop from almost the beginning.” This got me wondering: do 80% solutions now suffice nearly 100% of the time? And is this acceptable? Should we strive for more? Is the [...]

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Use Monarch to Build a Report with Both Details and a Summary

April 25, 2008

I was recently contact by a regular ExcelWithMonarch.com reader, Nigel Winton of England, who relayed how he used Monarch to create an interesting solution to a challenge given to him by a co-worker. Here’s his story… I have one person who is always requesting something new. You know the type: flexible goal posts with no [...]

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Presentation Matters

March 26, 2008

I was watching a music documentary on television recently, and one of the comments made really, um, struck a chord with me. The interviewee in one particular segment was talking about how the introduction of music video in the 1980′s changed the industry, and how the careers of talented musicians such as Supertramp arguably ended [...]

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Revise Excel Formulas Quickly with Search and Replace

March 4, 2008

You can save yourself a lot of manual editing, or even copying and pasting, in Excel by using the search and replace (Ctrl-h) feature. This will replace all occurrences of one value, or even a part of a formula, with a different value. Say you defined a lookup range improperly, setting the rightmost column to [...]

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Debugging Excel Formulas

February 29, 2008

It can sometimes be difficult to make sense of complex Excel formulas, especially if you’re not familiar with the functions being used. One great way to see what’s happening is to evaluate a portion of the formula at a time to determine why Excel is giving you the results that it is. To do this [...]

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Excel’s Formula Auditing Mode

February 26, 2008

If you’re trying to figure out where your complicated Excel model might be going off-track, or perhaps you’ve inherited someone else’s work and you just want to see the formulas used at a glance, use the Formula Auditing mode to help review the sheet. Pressing Ctrl-` will toggle between displaying formulas and values in the [...]

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