Debra’s Excel News–September 2024

Pivot table sorting, fun with movie titles, and more, in this month’s Excel news. Visit my Excel website for more tips, tutorials and videos, and check the index for past issues of this newsletter.

  • New on Contextures
  • Quick Tip: Sheet Count
  • Wrong Item at Top
  • Excel Movies
  • VisiCalc and AI
  • Monthly Photo – Excel’s Birthday

New on Contextures

1) Food Nutrients: I’ve added a new Excel sample file, and written details, for 1000 food items, with values for 12 key nutrients. I do our weekly meal plan in Excel, so I created this list, to make that job easier!

2) Excel Options: If you go into the Excel Option settings occasionally, watch my 3-minute video, so see a couple of time-saving shortcuts. It’s in the Turn Off Paste Options section, on the Fix Copy and Paste Problems page.

Quick Tip: See the Sheet Count

When you’re working in a large Excel file, you might want to see how many sheets are in the workbook.

Here’s an easy way to keep track of the sheets:

  • Right-click on the Status Bar, at the bottom of the Excel window
  • In the right-click menu, click Sheet Number

status bar sheet number

After that, the Sheet Number setting appears at the left side of the Status Bar. It shows you two details:

  1. number of sheets in the workbook
  2. sheet number for the active sheet

Find more Status Bar tips on my website.

Wrong Item at Top

After you sort a pivot table, sometimes the wrong item appears at the top. For example, in the screen shot below, the list of Sales Rep names has Jan at the top, instead of Bert.

Usually, this happens because pivot tables sort custom list items, such as month names (Jan), or weekdays.

wrong item appears at the top in pivot table

Fix the Sorting Problem

If you want to stop pivot tables from using those custom lists, you can turn off a pivot table setting.

My new 4-minute video shows the problem, and how to fix it.

And for a quick fix, the screen shot below shows where you can find the Custom Lists setting in the PivotTable Options window, on the Totals & Filters tab.

PivotTable Options window

VisiCalc and AI

In a 5-minute interview on Bloomberg TV, MIT Associate Professor William Deringer talks about VisiCalc, and how it affected the buyout industry. He says that spreadsheets didn’t just make things easier, “VisiCalc…seemed to change the limits of financial thinking and imagination.”
Deringer is also quoted in this Financial Times article about AI in financial modeling, and how it’s changing things, especially for the junior-level analysts, where “the coin of the realm in these fresh cohorts historically has been slick Excel skills.”

Excel Movies

On my YouTube channel last Friday, I asked, “You’re making a movie about Excel functions. What’s the title?”

The 4 options in my poll were:

  • Mad MAX, FINDing Nemo, TRUE Lies and Groundhog DAY

What’s the title of your Excel function movie?

Excel Function Movies

Photo: Excel’s Birthday

When Excel was released on September 30th, 1985, the top movie was Commando, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Which is perfect, because Command-O is the “Open” shortcut on a Macintosh! (You can find any date’s top movie on the Playback website.)

So, happy 39th birthday to Excel, later this month!

And here’s our 40-year-old Mac keyboard, with the Command key at the bottom left.

Mac keyboard, with the Command key

That’s it for this month’s news! If you have any comments or questions, please send let me know!

P.S. Visit my Contextures site for more Excel tips, tutorials and videos.

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Original source: https://contexturesblog.com/archives/2024/09/10/debras-excel-news-sept-2024/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=debras-excel-news-sept-2024

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