Clearly and Simply

Tag: camera object

  • Dynamic Icons in Microsoft Excel Cell Ranges

    Spice up your interactive Excel Dashboards with dynamically changing Icons, Pictures or Charts

    The Excel workbooks which came with two of my recently published posts showed dynamically changing flag icons inside of a dynamic table on an Excel dashboard.

    Showcase for Table Slicers on Excel Dashboards

    My 2 Cents on the COVID-19 Dashboard by JHU.

    Dynamic Icons Excel Ranges Intro

    The tables visualized data per country and the flag icons next to the country names were automatically adjusted if the user filtered the data, changed the sort criterion or scrolled within the table.

    This week I received some feedback on these workbooks and readers asked, if I could explain this in more detail. No sweat: todays post provides a step-by-step explanation of the technique and the according workbooks for free download.

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  • Excel Oddity: Camera Objects bloat File Size

    Camera objects (aka linked pictures to cell ranges) can considerably increase the size of an Excel workbook. Why?

    Vintage Camera - Photographer: Peter Miller (flickr.com)Camera Objects (aka linked pictures) are an easy-to-use, powerful and flexible technique in Excel, especially for making dynamic and interactive charts and dashboards.

    I learned this technique years ago from Charley Kyd’s fantastic e-book Dashboard Reporting With Excel.

    My good friend and Excel MVP Chandoo also wrote several articles about the Camera Object (all articles with ‘camera tool’ tag on chandoo.org).

    The feature may still not be as known among Excel users as it should be, but there are so many very good tutorials available that I do not need to write another one.

    As great as they are, Camera Objects always had a few issues (printing, merged cells, distorting captured charts, etc.) as Charley points out here: A New Excel 2010 Camera Tool Bug, and a Workaround.

    Today’s article will describe not a real bug, more an Excel oddity or annoyance regarding Camera Objects: the extensive use of Camera Objects can let the file size of your workbook explode, especially if they are linked to cells with inserted images sitting on top. I took a closer look into this and today’s post describes what I found out.

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