Picking the right Android Phone

I have been an ardent Android user for the last couple of yea or so. I switched from an iPhone. I don't want to get the iOS vs. Android debated started here, but rather clarify the Android purchasing decision. How do you pick the right phone in a sea of hundreds of devices from more than a dozen handset providers. Here is a summary of things we'll discuss



1. Economics
2. Brand vs. Value
3. Hardware Features
4. Skins and Customizations
5. Android Version

Google Trix! - Waterfall Charts on google spreadsheet

Waterfall charts are very common. You see them everywhere. They let you visualize a series of Business events, drivers or activities to explain 2 data points. An example below is a 2013 Revenue waterfall for a Business. It explains where the incremental revenue in 2013 was generated from.
There are tonnes of excel tutorials out there, but here is one for google spreadsheets.

Distraction free writing on Android. Review of Minimalistic text editors

Back when I owned an iPhone, not too long ago, I stumbled across PlainText, a free app by the Writeroom team. It was a barebone minimalistic writing app which would sync with dropbox, enabling me to continue writing cross device and cross platform.

That's when I discovered art of minimalistic distraction free writing. All you get is a full screen of blank canvas. No intruding buttons, plethora of menu options or distracting bright colors. As a writer, you focus on simply transforming ideas into words.

When I moved to the Android platform, I was looking for a similar alternative.

Fixing UNetbootin on Mac OS X to create a Bootable Linux USB

If you had issues trying to create a bootable linux usb for a pc, from your Mac, the below tutorial might help you. Even though it sounds slightly ironic, creating a pc bootable linux distro from a Mac, it's a situation I recently faced. So sharing the workaround.

Another hard disk crash but we never learn

I have lost count of the number of hard disks I have lost over the years. One would expect after years of repeated mistakes, I am more prepared and the road to recovery should be easy. However, it wasn't. So this is what happend.

Excel Quick Tip: Counting occurrences of a character in a cell

I found an interesting problem recently. We have a shared google docs at work for folks to sign up for hobby clubs. The idea was people to sign up against clubs by adding their names in a cell.

In the next week or so, the docs was filled with names and I wondered if there was a cool way to count the people who had signed up, using a simple formulae.

So here is the solution, which works both in excel and google docs.

Excel Quick Tip: Finding Year and Quarter from dates

I deal with huge data around dates all the time.  Be it daily revenue, volume or activities. Though daily data is interesting,  we often need to aggregate data into weeks, months or quarters, to see trends, forecast projections and track them against targets.

Here is a quick tip on getting you the year, month, quarter and weeks from a given date. Read on.

Google Spreadsheet tip: how to SUMIFS

SUMIFS is probably the most useful feature, Microsoft rolled out in Excel 2007. It lets you SUM a range, using multiple criteria. For instance, in the situation below, if we wanted to find out how much John made in 2010 Q3, you could use this simple formula.

Now how do you do this in google spreadsheet? Unfortunately, it only has the older SUMIF formula, which lets you select a single criteria. Let's see how to make it work.