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Create a Holiday Email in Excel, using HYPERLINK function


Create Holiday Greetings Email in Excel, using HYPERLINK function

         It seems like this year passed by particularly fast, and now we are at a point when people expect to receive Holiday Greetings from us. Did you know to that you can compose your holiday email entirely in Excel, using the HYPERLINK function? We need to meet two basic requirements: 1) set up a default email client (Outlook, LotusNotes, Thunderbird, GroupWise, etc.,) AND 2) your entire message (including To/CC/BCC/Subject/Body fields) needs to be 255 characters long or shorter. While this method requires no macros, nor VBA code, it cannot actually “send” the email for you, it will open it in your default email client, but you still need to click the SEND button.

          HYPERLINK function has the following syntax (link_location,[friendly_name]). This means that the only required parameter is link_location, passing a sample email address argument, we can create a simple email link using this syntax: =HYPERLINK(“mailto:Email1@example.com”). I would strongly advise to also name your hyperlink, otherwise the cell containing it will appear to be blank. Unfortunately, we can find rather limited documentation on HYPERLINK function within Excel Help section. However, Microsoft did publish additional information about this function. This article can help us easily add To,CC,BCC,Subject, and Body fields to our email template.
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7 Ways to conditionally calculate sum of values in Excel.


Conditional SUM functions in Excel

         Excel offers different ways to accomplish the same task. This is especially evident in the case of using Excel functions, where we can simply choose the one that offers the best solution, or more realistically, the one that we are more comfortable using. As an example, let’s solve the following scenario: We are offering online Excel courses both: on our internal website, as well as on Udemy’s platform. Udemy charges us 50% fee on all course sales, and also offers promotional rates to increase our volume. As a result, we are selling the same content at different prices. Looking at Thanksgiving week sales performance, let’s calculate our total Net Sales for all of Udemy transactions (highlighted). Let’s use different Excel functions to perform calculation required.

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Using SUBTOTAL Excel function

SUBTOTAL Excel Function

         Let’s talk about benefits of using SUBTOTAL Excel function. This function offers too many features to be overlooked. On the surface, it appears that this function does nothing more than its name suggests: calculates a subtotal of your references: constants, individual cells, or ranges of cells. The reality is that this versatile function calculates 11 different subtotals, (think 11 functions in one): AVERAGE, COUNT, COUNTA, MAX, MIN, PRODUCT, STDEV, STDEVP, SUM, VAR, VARP. This function works similarly to your typical SUM or AVERAGE, where you need to reference your data range to be used in the calculation, however, you also need to specify function type. As you are typing the name of this function in your formula bar, Excel will automatically display the list of possible function types, or you can look up function types from the table below. The function’s syntax is very simple: = SUBTOTAL(FUNCTION_TYPE, RANGE)

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Highlights of Gary Cokins Business Analytics seminar

Business Analytics

         Last month I attened Business Analytics seminar by “an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in performance improvement systems and cost management” : Gary Cokins.

         My slideshare presentation in the bottom of this post summarizes Gary’s informative and thought-provoiking presentation. In fact, some statements in this post were provoked by this seminar. Gary started by quoting Jeanne X. Harris :“40% of important decisions are not based on facts but rather on intuition, experience, and anecdotal evidence.” Arguably, we could improve the world by basing our decisions on facts, and making better decisions in the process. In addition, better decisions result in better actions, saving us time, effort, money, and other resources. The “actions” part is really important in terms of differentiating Business Analytics from Business Intelligence.

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