Category: work efficiency
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Excel trick: Search for multiple keywords from a list
Recently I was given a large spreadsheet with people’s expertise written in long phrases, and I had to identify those people who have AI-related expertise. The issue here is that people can enter a variety of phrases such as “machine learning”, or “large language model”. How do I quickly identify those people? Fortunately we can…
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Google Colab is an awesome Python programming tool for AI and data analysis
Picture credit: Microsoft Bing Co-Pilot Image Generator One of the problems associated with learning to code is that the initial hurdle of just getting your first line of code to run is pretty high. You need to get comfortable with a command-line driven interface. You need to install multiple packages depending on your particular needs,…
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An successful entrepreneur is a technician, manager and entrepreneur in one
A lot of people start their own businesses because they like doing a particular thing (baking, cooking, designing, selling), but very often they realize there are so many things beyond doing that one thing – like book keeping, sales and marketing, customer service – that they are quick overwhelmed. That is also the reason a…
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Will Robots kill human jobs? Yes and No
I have been long perplexed by this question of whether automation and robots will replace human workers. My intuition is that while they will no doubt replace many jobs, they will also create more jobs in other areas. That intuition was confirmed after I read a paper by Acemoglu, Koster and Ozgen (2023), but the…
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You just have to hustle
Photo: TD Garden, Boston, Feb 2024. I am reading the book “Don’t Trust your Gut” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. I highly recommend it. There are so many great insights and nice stories that are actually helpful to someone who wants to be happy and successful. I paid particular attention on how to make yourself more likely…
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Choosing the right fuel (II): Total cost
We have discussed the cost of using different types of fuel. Now let’s step back and talk about what are the total cost involved in marine shipping. For marine shipping, the following costs are relevant: Fuel cost, including initial purchase, energy conversion, distribution, operations and maintenance cost. Ship building/retrofit cost: How much does it cost…
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Clustered bar chart and stacked barcharts, switch rows/columns, overlap and customize shapes
Bar charts are one of the most frequently used charts. To use them effectively to generate on-the-point graphs that deliver exactly the right message, however, requires some deeper understanding as well as a few tricks to make them more appealing. I made a quick video that talks about: 1- The basic difference between clustered bar…
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Things I learned When Lighting a Fire
It is getting cold, and I started to use my beloved wood stove on a daily basis. I am not a novice, but I have not been lighting a fire for quite a few years because we have been moving about. After a few failed attempts trying to light a fire – mostly trying to…
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Daniel Pink’s “When” is an Illuminating Book Towards High Productivity and Better Living
I stumbled upon the book “When” during a trip to my local library. What a pleasant surprise – I have been pondering about the same question: Why does our mood change somewhat predictably during the day? It turns out there have been tons and tons research on this. But what Dan Pink is great at…
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Elon Musk Gets Manufacturing
Why is large-scale manufacturing hard? This is one thing that many people do not quite grasp. And indeed it can be hard to explain, because there are a number of governing operations principles that are often in play at the same time. But when I read about what Elon Musk recently said about manufacturing, I…
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Excel Shortcut Keys (2020 Edition)
Every year I update my favorite shortcut keys. Here is the 2020 version. You can also download PDF here.
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Sensitivity Study (or Scenarios) with Data Table
In managerial decision making, many time we need more than just an optimal decision. Often we would like to know how my results change if I change my decision in a certain way, or if one of the environmental parameters change. In other words, we want to do what-if analysis. In Excel this is made…
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PivotTable: Calculated Fields
Sometime, after you have made a PivotTable you realize you might want to do some further calculations based on the summary results. For example, After getting the total revenue of a company by each division, and the total number of orders for each division, then you might want to calculate the revenue per order -right…
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Dashboard with PivotTable
Dashboard is an effective communication tool to summary and highlight your data and your analysis. Here is an example of an Excel Dashboard that I made with PivotTable (and doughnut charts). Download the Excel file here. How do you make an effective dashboard? Here are what I consider some key steps: 1- Have a goal. What…
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Data Slicer and Timeline are Useful Reporting Tools in PivotTable
Most of us know how to use a Filter in PivotTable, but do you know that there is an even better tool in slicing data in PivotTable? Yes, there is, and the name is, well, Data Slicer. Along with the generic slicer that works for every column, there is another slicer that works specifically for…
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Most Used Excel Shortcut Keys – Mac and PC
Finally I found some time to sit down and compile a list of Excel shortcut keys that I personally consider most used (and thus most useful). Please note that these are only about 1/3 of all shortcut keys that are available for Microsoft. There are some that you may find most useful but are not…
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Chance of Nothing Happening? The Power of Joint Probabilities
Yesterday, as I was reading a book about Blackstone, the famed asset management company, something caught my attention. It was about how one of its executives describing evaluating risks in a potential deal: ” You say there’s a chance there’s a major terrorism event blowing up an airline, but that happens once in twenty years,…
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Here is Another Example on Why Excel will Never Go Away – Julia Computing
Recently I had a conversation with a colleague who argues that Excel will die because he felt people are switching to other computing environments such as R. While I agree there are more people who are using other computing languages such as R, I do not agree Excel will be out of fashion very soon. …
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What (and when) are the most popular US cities to visit?
For some business reasons, I need to check what the most popular tourists destinations in the US are. It is not hard to find such data. The US National Travel and Tourism Office complied overseas visitor data which will shed some light on our questions. Here is the data link, in case you like to…
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Google Sheets is Catching up with Excel in Charting
Excel is still my number one choice when it comes to graphing and charting, or just first-cut exploring, but I have notice that Google Sheets is also becoming more and more capable in its charting department. Do you know Google Sheets have Pivot Table? Do you know that it has a motion chart that even…