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...
What is Your Favorite Data Source?
My students and I recently began a crowd-sourcing project – To collect some of the most worthy data-centric websites, so that others can learn and share as well. We need...
All Great Boston Area Towns Benefitting from the Housing Boom? Not Quite So
I recently came across an interesting summary table on median condo prices in the Great Boston area (re-created in Excel below; original data from the Boston Magazine, whose...
How Advance do People Make Rental Car Reservations? The Result May Surprise You!
Spring break is upon us. Many students of mine are heading to exotic location, and quite a few of them have reserved rental cars many weeks earlier. But here is the question:...
How to Estimate Uber’s Monthly Ride Volume in 3 steps
Many of my students are heavy Uber users. So I asked them one day, “What do you guess should Uber’s monthly ride number be in the US?” It turned out to be a...
How to Draw a Pareto Chart?
Pareto chart, put simply, is a sorted frequency chart. It is used mainly for identifying the most frequent occurrences in a collected sample. Some business-situation questions...
Sparkline (aka chart-in-a cell) really sparkles!
In many cases, you need to generate a series of graphs using Excel, and yet do not want to put them into one single picture. For example, you would like to draw the price...
Data Table is a Secret Weapon in Excel Modeling and Analysis
Scenario analysis (also called What-ifs) is an indispensable part of business decision models. What is demand is only half of predicted? What if conversion rate is 50% higher?...
“That’s twice the size of Texas. They may never find us.”
Wait…what’s this? You might be wondering. What does it have to do with Excel modeling? Let me explain. First of all, this is a quote from the move...