Excel Tip of the Week: Transpose

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

This week’s topic is transposing data.

Transposing is taking a set of data and reorienting it from vertical to horizontal or vice versa. When you are working with multiple rows or columns, transposing will essentially switch your column headings to row headings and vice versa. Excel has a few ways to accomplish this and I’ll be showing you two of them today. The first way is via the Paste Special feature (building on last week’s post) and the other way is through a special function called TRANSPOSE (go figure).

Paste Special: Transpose
This is the simpler method to transpose data, but as you’ll see it is static and doesn’t allow for dynamic updating. Here are the steps to transpose the data in the example spreadsheet.

  1. Download the example spreadsheet here.
  2. Highlight the range B3:M3 (all the months) and then copy (Ctrl +C)
  3. Move to cell C7
  4. PC: From the “Home” menu in the “Clipboard” section click “Paste” then select “Transpose.” The icon looks like this:  (Keyboard shortcut Alt → H → V → T)
  5. Mac: From the “Home” menu in the “Edit” section click “Paste” then select “Paste Special”. The “Transpose” option is in the bottom right of the dialogue box. Click OK.
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Queering the MBA

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Dani Piergallini

Editors’ note: It is common for students to attend business school for the purpose of making a major career change, and there are myriad programs and support staff in place to help facilitate this sort of transition. But a second year at Owen, Danielle Piergallini, is undergoing a much more profound change. OwenBloggers is proud to present the first in a series of lifestyle pieces written by Danielle chronicling her experience as a transgender student at a major American business school.

Door number one is safe. It’s comfortable. You’ve opened it all your life, and people have even been nice enough to hold it open for you. It’s the door to the house you grew up in, the one that feels so familiar every time you step inside, especially those times when you return after being gone a little too long. Yet despite that – you’ve always wanted to crack open door number two and peek inside. It’s the door they steered you away from time after time. It’s at the end of a long, dark hallway. It’s locked. If you open that door, people will scream at you (if you’re lucky).

Read the full post (est. reading time 2:42 mins)
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Owen Reading List Series: Brian McCann

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Clark Bosslet

The first in our series of professor reading lists comes from Brian McCann, who handles our core strategy class and our corporate strategy elective. We asked him to suggest some books and blogs for current and prospective students, and this is the list he came up with. (Editor’s note: The list Professor McCann provided was rather exhaustive, so I pared it down to only the non-fiction books and blogs. However, I’m sure Professor McCann would want you to know his interests are broader and more eclectic than what is represented below.)

Books:

The Power of Intuition – Gary Klein

*How We Decide – Jonah Lehrer

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making – Max Bazerman and Don Moore

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert Cialdini

Quirkology – Richard Wiseman

Predictably Irrational – Dan Ariely

The Upside of Irrationality – Dan Ariely

*The Halo Effect – Phil Rosenzweig

*Fooled by Randomness – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

*The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

*The Strategy Paradox – Michael Raynor

When Genius Failed – Roger Lowenstein

The New Business Road Test – John Mullins

Getting to Plan B – John Mullins

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Excel Tip of the Week: Paste Special

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Doug Midkiff

This week’s topic is Paste Special.

I really should have covered this one a long time ago, but better late than never. I’ve actually hinted at this feature a couple times, most notably in the “Linked Picture” post, but also in the “Pasting into PowerPoint and Word” post.

This is one of the most essential features in Excel and allows you to do a number of things with your data. There is actually too much to cover in one post, so today I’ll be showing you 1) Paste Special: Values 2) Paste Special: Formats 3) Paste Special: Formulas.

All Paste Special options can be accessed by clicking on the “Home” menu and then in the “Clipboard” group clicking the “Paste” button (not the big clipboard icon). From there you can hover your mouse over the various icons to see what each one does.

For Mac users it is basically the same. After you click “Paste” you have to then click “Paste Special” and a dialog box will pop up showing you all your options.

Read the full post (est. reading time 1:39 mins)
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Wikipedia’s Effective SOPA Protest

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Clark Bosslet

As most internet traffickers have undoubtedly discovered by now, Wikipedia has blacked out its website today to protest the proposed SOPA legislation, which, the site argues, “could fatally damage the free and open Internet.” If you clicked the link on 1/18, you noticed that the site wisely decided to leave the SOPA page accessible to cast a sort of spotlight on the issue.

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are littered with comments bemoaning life without Wikipedia, with most commenters expressing something to the effect of, “I’d never realized how many times a day I reference Wikipedia…” I definitely missed having access to the site throughout the day, especially when I was listening to Heems’ hyper-referential mixtape, Nehru Jackets, and trying to sort through his litany of cultural name drops.

Without Wikipedia, I, like the site, was left in the dark.

For this stroke of genius, I offer a hearty kudos to Jimmy Wales and his team. While the explicit cause of the blackout was to protest the legislation, they have certainly achieved an implicit goal as well.

That is, they reminded all of us that life without Wikipedia sucks.

Read the full post (est. reading time 1:13 mins)
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