One year ago yesterday, the very first post went up on Swiss Army Spreadsheets. To celebrate this milestone, it seems like a good time to post an index to everything that’s gone up so far.

I was recently asked for ideas on how to present statistics. It’s a good question because, let’s face it, people don’t like numbers. They want information that’s easy to digest…and, almost more importantly, they want information that LOOKS like it’s… Read moreCell & table formatting

There’s a third kind of “paste special” that I haven’t discussed yet — transposing. When you paste transposed, you’re switching the rows and columns with each other. The cell in C1 (3rd column, 1st row) swaps places with cell A3… Read moreSwitching rows and columns

A while ago I explained why you might want to paste as values, and how to do it in various programs using the “paste special” options. Another possibility with “paste special” is pasting as text. This isn’t quite the same… Read morePasting as text: Basic how-to

The flip side of importing files is, of course, exporting them. In some ways, importing files from another format is easier. If you mess it up, you know right away. With exporting, however, you won’t know until you try to… Read moreExporting files

I mentioned earlier that one very common error code in spreadsheets is what I’ll call the “missing reference error”. In this post I’ll cover the definition of the error, what it looks like in various spreadsheet programs, and some techniques… Read moreSpecific errors: Missing References

In honor of my NCLA presentation I’m going to talk this week about something that I’d previously mentioned, but not addressed: importing files from other formats. I talked previously about comma separated (CSV) and tab delimited values. These formats come… Read moreImporting files

Just a quick announcement: The annual North Carolina Library Association conference is starting a little more than a week from today. I’ll be presenting Thursday, October 6th from 4:15 to 5:30 on the uses of spreadsheets, and showing off some… Read moreNCLA announcement

Last week I talked about what worksheets are, why they’re interesting, and how to navigate them. This week I’m going to address a variety of things you can do with them, and how to do those things in various programs.

While we’re on the topic of removing things, I want to talk about adding and removing entire worksheets. I’ll start by explaining what they are, why you would want them at all, why you’d want insert more of them, and… Read moreWorksheets