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Slicers in Excel | Advanced Filters | Dynamic & Customised Dasbhoards

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Slicers are a very useful tool in Excel. They were introduced in Excel 2010. They come very handy while using pivot table and creating customised dashboards.  In most simple terms, Slicer provide clickable buttons to filer the data in a Pivot table or Pivot Chart. They come really handy when we need to create customised Pivot Tables and want to access filtered data easily.  Let us consider a scenario for retail store that ships products across geography. You have created a Pivot Table and Pivot Chart to show yearwise data. However, you want the data to be dynamic and show data pertaining to one or more regions.  No problem. Insert a slicer. The steps to insert slicer is illustrated below.  1. Click on the Pivot Table 2. Go to Insert tab on the ribbon.  3. Select Slicer.  A dialog box will open  4. Click on the column you want to filter. .  and you are done! Watch the video below.  With a filter, you have to select individual values. With a Sl...

Easiest Gantt Chart Hack

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Gantt chart are one of the most useful tools for consultants as well as Project Management Professionals. Gantt Chart is a primarily used to highlight project timelines which makes it the goto tool during pitch presentation as well as review presentations. Gantt chart visually highlights the task duration and helps in the project planning and execution. During pitch presentations and project planning stage, Gantt chart helps in highlighting the task wise timelines. During review presentations, it helps highlight the current status of the project.  Now preparing a Gantt Charts is a tedious task, especially using PowerPoint. We have to create the format first and then manually prepare bars, input timeline headers, etc. I know, I have struggled with this.  I have been searching for a way where most of the steps to create a Gantt Chart can be automated. And that is how I decided to prepare an excel format which automates most of the tasks involved in preparing a Gant...

Consultant’s Chart Cheatsheet

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As a Consultant, one has to work extensively with Excel and PowerPoint. These two software, probably consume most of the working time of a consultant. Preparing good presentations is a crucial skill that any consultant must muster. One of the most important aspect of a good presentation if its visual appeal. One may choose to call it aesthetics or simplicity or refined or sophisticated or anything else. The point remains that visual appeal is a must for any good presentation. A good presentation also is the one which brings out the intended message with clarity and simplicity. This brings us to Charts. One of the most crucial component of the presentation is Charts & Graphs. Data analysis and number crunching is integral to a consultant’s recommendation. Any recommendation holds water only when it is backed by solid research and the data which supports the hypothesis. So, let us see what makes up good charts. A good chart has to be  SUAVE . •      ...