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Friday, March 27, 2015

Visualize! Use Conditional Formatting's Icon Sets

Today with all the online presentations be it YouTube, Webinars or just an in-house presentation, visual impact has become a lot more important. People only used to just be concerned about colors and images when making PowerPoint slides but in today's environment  you need to consider it for spreadsheets as well.



Conditional formatting is a great feature in itself but today I wanted to focus on  icon sets as some people are not familiar with them or how they work. I am skipping the basics of the icon sets because if you select cells and apply an icon set, the  display is based upon percentages which I personally don't care for. Instead we are going to skip to the more advanced section where everything is a bit more black and white (so to speak)




Since everyone knows my love of lattes and chai, we will use a product line of coffees and teas. We want to emphasize the product lines that are are under budget in terms of their  unit sales. Which spreadsheet would you want to look at? Which has immediate impact? Which quickly identifies the problem products?


Hopefully, you guessed the bottom spreadsheet! To see how to do this, click on this link. and make sure to grab a cup of coffee before you start!















Friday, March 6, 2015

Workbooks - Protection and Encryption

How to password protect and encrypt an Excel workbook



How many passwords do you have? The answer is probably too many. 
Unfortunately, that is the way things are going and you probably need to start considering password protecting  some of your Excel files too. Be careful though - there is no HelpDesk to call if you forget the password!

Below is a guest post from Joe Helstrom on protecting a workbook.
To ensure that unauthorized users do not access a workbook, a workbook can be password protected. Without the password, users cannot access the worksheets within the workbook. It is an effective control as long as the password is limited only to those users with authorized access, is properly safeguarded and is not shared with anyone else. A password is not very effective if it’s on a sticky note attached to your computer monitor.  However, I am sure that none of you do that.

Ms. Excel- Resident Excel Geek