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Guest blogger Emily Warn is a writer and confirmed Excel geek. In this post, she demonstrates how to use the new Quick Analysis feature in Excel 2013 to create a spreadsheet with book sales numbers that can be sorted by name and number in order to make data tell a story by presenting it visually. ...( read more ) Read More...

In early May, we told you about the new video series Excel Skills Builder in our post " Take the first step in growing your Excel skills ." In that post, we announced the launch of lesson 1. Well, we've finally finished the rest of the lessons, and wanted to share this great resource with you! As a reminder, the skills builder is a video series that comprises short (typically under 5 minutes each) videos that give you an overview of a task or feature in Excel. The videos are grouped...

Sparkline charts are great, but there may be times they need a little visual massaging to maximize their usefulness. Consider this scenario: You have a system for which you want to track downtime over the course of a year and (fortunately) it had downtime events in only four of twelve months. Here's how to use and format sparkline charts to show this data effectively. ...( read more ) Read More...

  This blog post is brought to you by Karen Cheng a Program Manager on the Excel team.     In today's post, we'll show you how the arcade game Tower Defense was created in an Excel spreadsheet (see a video of the game being played here ).  In this game, creeps move toward your castle. You must defend it by placing towers which shoot at the creeps. The more creeps you kill, the more money you get to buy and upgrade your towers. To play, you'll need - · To download the...

In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have the data for the employee sign-up contest, this is a contest where employees try to get customers to sign-up for a bookstore club card. The contest has gone on for several weeks now, and each employee has a goal of 20 sign-ups per week. Right now the sparklines are conveying the history of sign-ups for each employee, for example...

In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the axis options for sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the number of books by category for each month. The sparklines in this example are giving the history of the count of books for each category, and it looks like they are at their lowest over the past half year or so. Let’s take look at the axis options for these sparklines. Selecting the sparklines gives you a sparkline...

In this blog post I’ll walk through creating sparklines in Excel 2010 using a sample table from the book store demo file: In the table we have the sales for the month of June: a column for total sales for the month, multiple columns for each day’s sales, and rows that break out different book categories. Sparklines will really be able to enhance the table and add to the understanding of the numbers by plotting out the month’s sales day by day in a single column, in line with the data. To get started...