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Charting the Course: Knowing and Measuring What Matters
Song Recommendation for today’s article: Hello, data whisperers! Remember the game Watch Dogs, where Aiden Pearce used his mad hacker skills to turn a whole city into his playground? Imagine if we could do the same with our businesses—cracking the code of success, and knowing exactly what actions to take to reach our objectives. Well,…
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Project 1 – Codename ‘Deep Below’: A User-Friendly Voyage through Excel, Power Query, and Power BI
Ahoy there, fellow data sailors! Recommended song for this project: “Sleeping in the cold below?” Not us, not today. We’re about to set sail on an adventure as exciting as any sea shanty, with a treasure more valuable than gold doubloons: data. Yes, my brave companions, today we embark on a journey that spans the…
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Heart in the Machine: Emotion, Empathy, and Their Unforeseen Role in Automation
I can neither confirm nor deny that I may have botched the scheduled publication time of today’s post on VBA… But in the spirit of consistency, I still wanted to get something fresh out for anyone who may be reading in the evenings after work. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am the type…
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VBA for Excel: Unleashing the Power of Automation
Hello, and welcome back! Today, we’re venturing into the magical realm of Excel automation with a look at Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), the programming language that turns Excel from a simple spreadsheet application into an automation powerhouse. Quick note here – I typically use VBA in this setting, as it just fits better with…
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Excel Beyond Excel: The Power of Power Query
Today’s businesses thrive on data. Data is being produced at an unprecedented rate and comes in almost too many different formats, from different sources, and with varying levels of quality. As a result, extracting useful information from this sea of data can sometimes feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. This is where…
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Pivot Tables: Your Personal Data Cruncher
Data. In our modern world, it’s everywhere. With the increase of digitized information, we have access to more data points than ever before. And Excel is one of the most popular tools for dealing with this data. But as any data analyst can tell you, large datasets can be a double-edged sword. Yes, they hold…
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A Step Deeper into Excel: Mastering Lookups and Logical Functions
Hola, data enthusiasts! Ready to venture deeper into the world of Excel lookup and logic functions, and take a look at why they’re some of the most commonly used tools in the business? We’re taking a journey today through the landscape of Logical and Lookup functions. While logical functions allow us to have some control…
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Bridging the Gap: How Mastery in Excel Sets You Up for Success in Programming and Automation
This piece will be more reflective than our typical content, because it ties heavily into why I’m writing these posts in the first place. I was fortunate to have someone help me get started (though he still denies he did much; you know who you are) in the world of reporting and automation early in…
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Spelling It Out: Mastering Text Functions in Excel
Have you ever received a messy spreadsheet with names in ALL CAPS, or addresses all jumbled together in one cell, or perhaps product codes with extra spaces? That’s where Excel’s text functions come in. They’re the unsung heroes of data cleaning, helping you whip that wayward text into shape and save tons of manual (and…
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Making Data Pop with Conditional Formatting: For when there’s…. not… a chart for that.
Ever stared at a spreadsheet full of numbers, struggling to make sense of it all? Don’t sweat it; we’ve all been there, and sometimes the summarization provided by a chart just doesn’t work. Enter Excel’s conditional formatting, a feature that can turn that number jungle into a beautiful, comprehensible garden. We’ll be focusing on Excel…
Abstract Foundations 