I found another Excel geek at Dreamforce

So this week I've been out in San Francisco at Dreamforce '07, and I've learned some incredible things about Salesforce.com -- better ways to extend what we're already doing and some cool new features do to hit this winter. I've also met some amazing people. One such person is Ezra Kenigsburg, a consultant and Salesforce.com Data Architect out of Chicago working in the Professional Services group.

Turns out Ezra is a bit of an Excel geek, too. Actually we met at a breakfast discussion of analytics, and he was mentioning that he was "...a bit of an Excel geek..." so I jumped in and said, "Oh, really? Well, I am THE Excel_Geek." We got along just fine from then.

Once we were finished chatting about Salesforce stuff, we jumped on this blog, so that he could see what I was all about. The last post on "Filling in the blanks..." was up, and a second or two after he read it, he showed me a far better, simpler way of doing was I had done.

Ever heard of "Edit --> Go To... --> Special"? Well, it's a pretty cool, little known feature. What you can do is select a large range, like we were dealing with in "Filling in the blanks..." and go to Edit --> Go To... --> Special, and select "Blanks". This will select only those cells within the range that are blank. (There are many other cool options, too, like selecting only formulas, comments, conditional formatting, data validation, etc. Oh the possibilities! Anyway...) Once you've got only the blank cell selected, if you click up into the Formula Bar and type in a formula you want -- in our "Filling in the blanks..." case, we wanted to average the four cells immediate left -- and instead of hitting <Enter> you'll hit <Ctrl> + <Enter>, which will copy that formula, adjusted for relative ranges, into all selected blank cells. Wow. The simplicity. Wanna make 'em all red now, simply Format --> Cells... --> etc.

Thank you, Ezra. Truly a pleasure to meet you.