Calculate and Compare Costs In Excel - New kalmstrom.com Tip

Excel is an excellent program to use if you need to calculate de costs of different alternatives. Excel formulas make it easy to see how figures change when new options are selected, and with the Excel charts you can visualize the figures and compare them more easily. I am showing this in a new demo about Excel calculations in the kalmstrom.com Tips section.

Flooring costs
In my example I calculate costs for different floor materials in an imaginary house renovation. The house has thirteen rooms of different sizes, and there are five floor materials of different costs to choose among.  In my Excel table I can see how costs varies depending on floor material, for the room as well as for the whole building.

Many tips
In my tutorial I show how do create the formulas needed, and in the process I also explain other useful things about Excel, such as

• Set number format
  
• Create a multiply formula
  
• Name an array of cells
  
• Create a vertical lookup formula
  
• Use the AutoSum button
• Copy format
• Create a data validation rule

Pivot chart
Finally I create a pivot chart where I can see more clearly how any changes I make in the tables affect the proportions of the flooring costs for the different materials.


By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Developer Intrigued By Historical Monuments

Two months ago we welcomed a new Trainee Developer to the Indore office, Arpeet Gujarathi. The older developers praise his ability to learn quickly, so we feel sure he will become a valuable team member. Here is Arpeet's own introduction.

 I completed my Bachelor of Engineering in Computer in 2012. After completion of the degree I continued with a course at the Pune Center for Development of Advanced Computing to further enhance my technical skills.

After that I joined the kalmstrom.com team  as a Trainee Developer. I am learning so much here, and I am thankful to the Kalmstrom family for giving me this opportunity and to the team members for their support.

During my first months with kalmstrom.com I have helped with the development of version 5 of TimeCard, the Outlook add-on for reporting of hours and expenses from within the Outlook calendar.

To learn more about SharePoint, which is an important platform for us, I have assisted in the creation of a few video demonstrations for Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint. We are in the process of giving a SharePoint option to all the kalmstrom.com applications, so I will probably work a lot with SharePoint later on.

I have also been given time to acquire a deeper knowledge about JavaScript and other code languages used in the development of the kalmstrom.com. products, and this has been very interesting.

Coming on to my family, my father is businessman and my mother is a housewife. I have two elder sisters, who both are employed outside the home. I am the youngest in my family.

I like to play cricket and read. As I am very interested in history, I read many historical books. I also like to visit historical places, and the image above shows me at the Sinhgad fort, which is two thousand years old and has played an important role in Indian history.

Arpeet Gujarathi
Trainee Developer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Swedish Inventions Interesting To Obama

Last week I joked about the US president's fascination for the Swedish music group Abba, but now that Mr. Obama has really visited Sweden we have learned that he is more interested in what we do in Sweden to solve problems with environment and climate changes.

Here I will not go into all the political aspects of the president's visit to Sweden. Instead I will just mention the technical research Barack Obama was informed about during his stay. I think it will interest readers of the kalmstrom.com Blog, and it might be forgotten in the international news reports.

Royal Institute of Technology
Yesterday Barack Obama visited the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, to get information about the ongoing research in renewable energy.

Among other things the president was shown a new invention, a method to clean water with the help of ultraviolet radiation. He also saw a plug-in hybrid motor that is under development. It will be used in Volvo busses, and Volvo claims it will not give any pollution at all.

Will learn from Sweden
On a question what Barack Obama brought back to the US from Sweden, he answered: "Number one, the work you have done on energy. I think it is something that the United States can and will learn from."

Obama stopped pollution for one day
Mr. Obama might have difficulties doing something about the global climate problems, but he surely made a difference in Stockholm during his visit. As cars were forbidden in parts of Stockholm, people could walk around in the center of the city without being disturbed by traffic or exhaust fumes.

"Why not make it a tradition to have a car and bus free day a year, whether a president is here or not?" suggested a stroller. Good idea!

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Ten Years With Skype

Skype went live ten years ago, on 29 August 2003, and less than two years after that I became the Product Manager for Skype Toolbars. I gave Skype more than five years, and I still have a keen interest for Skype. Congratulations to all my former colleagues and partners!

 Outlook Skype
I early saw the possibilities Skype gave, and my first plan was to develop kalmstrom.com products for Skype. In 2004 I could publish Outlook Skype, that connected Outlook and Skype. It soon became a success and led to an offer from Skype that I could not resist.

Skype Toolbars
In June 2005 I begun working full time as Product Manager for Skype toolbars. By then I had arranged it so that the kalmstrom.com products were taken well care of and my company could continue to grow even though my own contributions were not as extensive as before.

As Product Manager I was responsible for several enhancements of Skype. First of all the integration in Outlook add-on, of course, which was acquired by Skype. I also integrated Skype in the Microsoft Office suite and in Facebook.

Web integration
An interesting development task during my time at Skype was the website integration. If you have seen phone numbers on web pages turn into clickable buttons you know what I mean. It required a lot of research and tweaking before this click to call feature was finally released in 2007.

Great years
My years with Skype were fascinating and I met a lot of interesting and enthusiastic people. Still, I wanted to invest more time in my own products, so in October 2010 I left my employment at Skype.  However, that did not mean that I stopped using Skype!

Skype chats
The kalmstrom.com team is geographically distributed, and we use Skype chats for smooth communication. I also use Skype for my international calls – and they are many!

Folder HelpDesk integration
When we released version 13 of the kalmstrom.com incident management tool for Outlook, it had a new feature that was also connected to Skype: a possibility to call from inside the incident ticket. This feature may be used with any desktop calling application, but I think it will most often be Skype.

Here is much more about Skype's first ten years from another perspective: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/skypes-secrets/

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Use Excel Like A Washing Machine

Do you know that you can use Excel in the same way as you use the washing machine? Instead of washing one towel at a time you put all towels of similar material and color in the machine and wash them together. And in Excel you can manipulate cells with the same coordinates in multiple worksheets at the same time.

It is called 3D, and in a new demo in the kalmstrom.com Tips section I explain how to use 3D formulas.

Avoid tedious repetition
When you have an Excel workbook with several sheets with similar content, it is very convenient to use 3D formulas to make changes and calculations in all the worksheets at the same time. It saves time and makes calculations much more interesting.

Company budget
In the tutorial I show how to calculate a budget for a company with four departments. First I want to have sums for each department, and instead of adding auto-sums to each department i select all four tabs in the workbook and calculate them all at the same time.

The second step is to summarize the department budgets into a budget for the whole company, and that is quickly done with a formula that stretches over several tabs in the workbook.



Excel is a great invention, but so is the washing machine. Watch the Swedish statistician Hans Rosling explain why at http://youtu.be/BZoKfap4g4w.

By Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions