Excel Ticker | News, Tipps & Tricks round about Excel and other products from Microsoft

21. January 2012
by Roberto Mensa
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Dynamic Excel chart with dynamic title based on cell selection

This following post is a guest post and was written by Roberto Mensa, Krisztina Szabó and Gábor Madács. Thanks Roberto, Krisztina and Gábor

A few days ago we were working with the CELL formula to draw your attention to use the English info_type attribute if you share your Excel file with someone how uses Excel with different language setting. The second argument of this formula is the reference, which is optional. If it is omitted, the information is returned for the last cell that was changed, as we can read in the Excel Help.

Dynamic Chart in Excel

It is important to make it clear that “last cell that was changed” relates to the calculation. Change means a kind of change that triggers calculation. So if you manually re-calculate your sheet, the “last cell” will be the active cell where your cursor is positioned. My Hungarian friend Krisztina Szabó gave me an idea to build a dynamic chart based on the active cell. So we made a challenging example. In this article, we would like to show you how you can build up a similar solution based on our tricks. We have provided a sample file, which you can download at the end of this article.

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30. December 2011
by Mourad Louha
0 comments

Embedding an Excel file from SkyDrive on your website and mash it up by using JavaScript

If you are using SkyDrive for storing your Office documents, you have probably already discovered the features for sharing your files with other people. And perhaps you have also read on some blogs how to embed an Excel file to your website. Recently, the Excel Team has created the possibility to interact with an embedded Excel file by using JavaScript.

In this blog post, I will describe how to embed and interact with an Excel file from SkyDrive. For this, I uploaded a web app compatible version of my workbook for my Excel formula translations and then I implemented some JavaScript Code to change values in the embedded file.

The workbook includes five worksheets: “Info” just includes some info’s about me, “Formulas” lists the formulas in the different languages, “Compare” can be used for comparing the formulas in two languages, “Languages” includes the list of available languages and “Resources” allows to select between the three languages German, English and French for the interface of the workbook. My goal was now to allow to the user to select the two languages for comparing the formulas and to switch from one interface language to another.

Learn and explore

Microsoft has recently launched the website “Excel Mashup”, where in addition to learning materials and tutorials you will also find some very interesting code samples. The site also lists the most important links to the MSDN documentation about the JavaScript object model, methods and properties for the Excel Services.

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27. September 2011
by Mourad Louha
0 comments

Server failure on this domain on 09/26/2011

Unfortunately, my provider 1&1 experienced some network configuration problems on 09/26/2011 that have led to a server failure from approximately 14:45 to 16:45 and from 19:45 to 21:30 o’clock (Central Europe time).

Not only this domain was affected, but also several other domain hosted on this server like the German Excel Ticker, the Website about my services, the Excel Formula Translator or the German Office365-Forum.

According to the 1&1 blog, the failure was caused by a faulty network configuration, which in turn was caused by a software.

23. September 2011
by Mourad Louha
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Excel workbook including the formula translations for 32 languages as a byproduct of the Excel Formula Translator

While implementing the Excel Formula Translator in PHP, I created an Excel workbook including all my translations of the Excel formulas, error codes and arguments of the CELL() and INFO() functions. I thought, it would be a good idea to offer the file for free at the end of this article. Please do not hesitate to send me an e-mail or leave a comment here, if you find an error in one of the translations.

To extract the formulas in the different languages, I had firstly inserted all available formulas in a column in the “Formulas” worksheet of the workbook. For this, I used the English version of Excel, as English is my reference language and I sorted all formulas in alphabetical order. Of course, as I am usually using the German version of Excel, I had to install the English language pack.

Excel Formula Translator

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22. September 2011
by Mourad Louha
0 comments

Online Excel Formula Translator Version 1.50

I recently released version 1.50 of my free online Excel Formula Translator. The translator can be used to translate both single Excel Formulas and combined complex formulas. For example the formula =PROPER(MID(A1;FIND(“.”;A1)+1;FIND(“@”;A1)-FIND(“.”;A1)-1)) to extract the first and last name from an e-Mail address is translated to =NOMPROPRE(STXT(A1;TROUVE(“.”;A1)+1;TROUVE(“@”;A1)-TROUVE(“.”;A1)-1)) in French.

MSDN actually provides 43 language packs for Microsoft Office 2010, which I downloaded and installed in a virtual machine. I then compared the Excel functions, the Excel error codes and the arguments of some specific functions to the English version. And I have found 32 languages which have differences and included these languages in the translator.

Excel Formula Translator

However, in some languages the differences are minimal. For example, the only difference I found in the Japanese language pack is the DOLLAR() function which was replaced by YEN(). Another example is Thai, where the only difference is the argument “System” for the INFO() function. So, for these languages, the translator will in most cases return the same result as for English.

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