Big data is a popular concept, and problem, in the information world.  It’s things like data about every item bought by every person in every store of a large chain, every day of the year for multiple years.  That’s the… Read moreHow big is big?

I was recently looking at apartments online, trying to figure out which ones were worth stopping by in person to take a closer look at. As with any major data project I stored the information in a spreadsheet, but once… Read moreThe same but different: conditional formatting in adjacent cells

Last week I said that I told the spreadsheet to do one thing if the cell contained an opening tag, and a different thing if it contained a closing tag, but I didn’t explain how I did that. The answer… Read moreIdentifying opening and closing tags

The other day I was humming along, writing HTML, but when I went to look at the result it was obvious that I’d missed a closing tag somewhere. That’s not too uncommon, and fortunately there’s a number of ways of… Read moreDebugging: Finding missing closing tags

There’s a lot of really useful things you can do with heatmaps, and one of those things is analyzing activity patterns.

Spreadsheets have a lot of neat ways to graph things, but there’s one common type of graph that you won’t find on the built-in list:

Last week I mentioned that there were some refinements that could be applied to the greeting card inventory to take advantage of the fact that it’s in a spreadsheet, not on a piece of paper.

Another useful little holiday tool I’ve developed is a card tracker. If you’re of the school of manners that says you shouldn’t send the same greeting card to the same person two years in a row, or to two people… Read moreTracking greeting cards