Thoughts, musings, and, hopefully, not too many redundancies on the world of business data. If you missed the irony in the previous sentence, you may struggle with my writing style.
I’ve had a pretty good run of theoretical posts about the nature of marketing measurement of late, so it seemed like I was due for a more down-in-the-weeds-Excel-efficiency-tactics write-up. This blog isn’t really focussed on all of the myriad ways that Excel can be contorted to represent data effectively, but I’m a big believer in [...]
As I wrote in my last post, I’ve been spending a lot of time building out Excel-based dashboard structures and processes of late. I also wrote a few weeks ago about calculating trend indicators. A natural follow-on to both of those posts is a look at the “metric widget” that I use as a basis [...]
Wow. This post started out not as a post, but as what I thought was going to be a 5-minute exercise with Google to download a colorblind-friendly palette for Excel charts. That was two weeks ago, and this post is just scratching the surface. Several weeks ago, one of the presenters in a meeting showed [...]
I got an e-mail last week just a few hours into Round 1 of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The subject of the email was simply “dumb graph,” and the key line in the note was: The “game flow” graph…how in the WORLD is that telling me anything? That the score goes up as [...]
How’s that for a book title? Would it pique your interest? Would you download it and read it? Do you have friends or co-workers who would be interested in it? Why am I asking? Because it doesn’t exist. Yet. Call it a working title for a project I’ve been kicking around in my head for a couple [...]
I’ll put my standard big, fat, hairy disclaimer here that this blog is not about Excel tips. There are lots of resources for that. As a matter of fact, the Contextures blog is one that I stumbled across after Debra commented on my last Excel tip. Nevertheless, here’s a handy one that requires no customization [...]
For a variety of reasons, I find myself using Excel (2003) through remote desktop fairly regularly these days, and I just haven’t gotten around to setting up some of the basics that I’ve got set up on my main system. The big one is my setup of <Ctrl>-<Shift>-<V> as Paste Special»Values.There are scads of “Excel [...]
I’ve glanced through various folks’ copies of Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data on several occasions over the past few years. And, it was a heavy influence on the work that an ad hoc team in the BI department at National Instruments undertook a couple of years ago to standardize/professionalize [...]
Categorize this as the most tactical of Excel posts ever. But, doggonit, it sometimes amazes me how many really, really, really handy features of Excel most people don’t even know exist. Even in Excel 2003. This is one that I showed to a co-worker several weeks back as I was looking over her shoulder at [...]
I was on-site at a client for a couple of days last week and, during a break, got into a discussion with their resident CRM system expert. This fellow had managed some crazy stuff in Siebel for a major credit card company and was now working with Salesforce.com and a mishmash of other systems for [...]
Three things I know: 1) My wife got the raw end of the deal when she married me, 2) I blog because it keeps my e-mails shorter, and 3) If you have the urge to talk about data usage in business, I'll do so until long after that desire has passed (for you). If you want to know more, check out my About Gilligan on Data page.