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Home > Excel CatalogPlug-N-Play Kit #1 >

General Questions About
Plug-N-Play Excel #1


by Charley Kyd

Miscellaneous Questions About Plug-N-Play

You say that it should take about two hours to update the reporting workbook for the first time. How did you come up with that estimate?
It probably will take 20 to 30 minutes to read the setup instructions, enter your company name and date, and update the first chart. The next few charts probably will take about five minutes each. The last few probably will take less than a minute each...if you copy and paste-special from your source data as the instructions suggest.

So 25 minutes plus 15 charts at, say, three minutes each comes to an hour and 10 minutes. Two hours should therefore be a safe estimate.


I'm using your dashboard book and its sample dashboard workbooks to create my own dashboard reports. Is there any reason to get your Plug-N-Play reports?
Probably. The PNP reporting workbook provides ten completed dashboards that you can use or modify easily. All you need to do is to add formulas to the supporting worksheets, formulas that return data from your Excel database or from other databases.

Also, the PNP kit provides 15 color themes that you'll definitely find useful.



Questions About the Reporting Worksheet

The worksheets that support your charts and tables are named "A", "B", "C", and so on. Why do you use letters like that?
Using single-letter names allows us to see as many tabs as possible at one time. It also makes formulas easier to modify.

Why aren't the letters R or C used as names of worksheets? And why don't you use numbers as names?

When we use R or C as names, or when we use numbers, Excel puts single quotes around those characters in formulas. To illustrate, if you changed the name of sheet D to C, the formula...

=D!FigTitle

...becomes...

='C'!FigTitle

Those single quotes are a real pain to work with.

Excel treats R and C differently than the other letters because it also must support the R1C1 cell referencing method. This alternative to the A1 method is seldom used but can be very powerful at times.



 
 
 
 


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