Windsong Training

05/18/2022

Introduction to Excel’s SUMPRODUCT Function

In this article we will focus on introducing Excel’s SUMPRODUCT function. It is also, in part, a continuation of a previous article Excel and Some linear Algebra using Matrix Multiply to Solv…

05/17/2022

Dimensions and Measures in Excel Pivot Tables

Excel’s pivot table is a tool that allows us to summarize and explore data held in one worksheet or Excel table, and display the results of the summarization in a second table. In this post w…

02/26/2022

Importing Large Files into the Excel Data Model

03/30/2021

In this article we are going to look at Excel’s Goal Seek command. This command is actually quite easy to use, and it is very popular because of its ability to look backwards from a given result. A common example used to illustrate this command is finding the amount a person can borrow, at a given interest rate, based on a monthly payment; basically, pairing Goal Seek with the PMT function. ...

03/26/2021

“Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-posts for support rather than illumination” -A. Lang Statistics is a very complex subject and because of its complexity statistics and its terms are frequently misunderstood and misused. I came across an excellent article on The datapine Blog about how statistics can be misleading. One of the statistical terms “correlation” is a term that may be used improperly....

03/11/2021

I was reading about one of the new functions that Microsoft has added to Excel, XLOOKUP(), and I started wondering where the different LOOKUP() functions came from. This little rabbit hole turned out to be quite revealing in terms of the way that Excel looks and works - the search took me to some history of VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 which we will look at here....

02/09/2021

We currently (as of Jan, 2021) have large amounts of data concerning the Covid-19 pandemic available. We have daily updates through various news outlets and we can download data from different country's public data websites. Aggregated data is available for viewing at Worldometers coronavirus page, and for download at Our World in Data's Covid-19 data download page. We can certainly rely on experts to provide data and their interpretations, but sometimes it is enlightening to download the data and try to understand it ourselves....

01/19/2021

We have a steady supply of Covid-19 statistics and graphs on sites like Worldometers with their corona virus page, and Our World in Data, and their corona virus page. Some of the available graphs have an option to show "Moving Averages" with averages of 3 days or 7 days. These averages smooth the data to hide rabid fluctuations....

01/07/2021

This is another in a series of Excel’s Conditional Formatting How-To's. The pervious post looked at the Highlight Cell Rules option. (For Details See: Excel Conditional Formatting Highlight Cell Rules). In this article we are going to look at another option namely: Color Scales. Using Color Scales is a popular formatting technique that lends itself very well to most spatial data - think of a map....

12/30/2020

Once the Data Analysis toolbox has been enabled, the correlation function is ready to use. For this example, we are going to use data from two stock market indexes: NASDAQ Composite Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average ( and . The data is the daily closing price for the last 6 months of 2019. Here is a sample of the first few and the last few lines of the example file, and a graph of the data for the last 6 months of 2019:...

Once the Data Analysis toolbox has been enabled, the correlation function is ready to use. For this example, we are going to use data from two stock market indexes: NASDAQ Composite Index and the D…

12/23/2020

First: What is the Analysis ToolPak: Excel’s Analysis ToolPak provides a variety of tools and functions which enable sophisticated data analysis to be preformed. It produces output tables, and, in addition, some tools also generate charts. The add in takes the basic Excel functions and combines them into workflows where only the input values and output space is required. The Analysis ToolPak add-in is already installed with Excel but it will need to be enabled through the Excel Options menu....

First: What is the Analysis ToolPak: Excel’s Analysis ToolPak provides a variety of tools and functions which enable sophisticated data analysis to be preformed. It produces output tables, and, in …

12/16/2020

In previous articles we discussed adding fixed error bars and Standard Deviation error bars to Excel charts. The last option available on the Format Error Bars dialog is the standard error, short for "standard error of the mean". Using the same data set that we used for the post Standard Deviation Error Bars in Excel, we can choose the Standard Error option from either the Chart Elements button in the upper right corner of the chart, or from the Format Error Bars dialog....

In previous articles we discussed adding fixed error bars and Standard Deviation error bars to Excel charts. The last option available on the Format Error Bars dialog is the standard error, short …