It has been a particularly geeky day for the Poorhouse today as it happens. Ugh. So let's celebrate with the latest of his Excel discoveries designed to allow an optimum amount of user laziness in between the awful clicking between cells, formulae that make sense only to Stephen Hawking and charts formatted so horrifically that it must have been intentional.

This one's a macro to solve the insanely annoying "Number stored as text" error, which usually occurs when copying and pasting data from elsewhere, or when an idiotic, deserves-to-be-spat-on colleague sends you something that is either exhibiting a remarkable level of stupidity or a deliberate wind-up.

Joys! Another post on the intricate un-wonders of Microsoft Excel. As all those who are unlucky enough to be Excel fiends know, there is enough about it that is a right royal pain in the ass. Anything that can make working with it a little easier has surely got to be welcome. Especially if it's free, given it's not always easy to get employers to actually give you anything involving £, and it feels morally wrong to make a personal investment into the mysterious lands of numbers in squares.

With that in mind, here's the Poorhouse's current top 3 free downloadable addons for others who spend double-digit hours a day inside this most gridular of programs. All guaranteed working for at least Excel 2003, and probably other versions too.

The Poorhouse spends increasing amounts of his time with his head buried in the pile of small grey rectanges that is Microsoft Excel. This mind-boggling time is sometimes more than it really needs to be due to strangely lacking features in this program of a billion obscure functions. Take for example the variable width column chart (aka as the a start towards a matrix or Marimekko chart).

One use of such a beast is to represent 2 dimensions of data within a simple bar format - the height of the bars is the classic key dimension, and the width is another. Below is an example of this in practice. This made-up chart shows the amount of income generated by sales of cars by the paint colour of the car on the Y-axis, and the quantity of cars sold itself is reflected in the width of the bar. The wider the bar, the more cars were sold. Blue cars clearly generated the most income - and the wide width of the bar shows that this could be because the largest proportion of cars sold were blue (in the real world of course the chart would be appropriately captioned...). [edit: this isn't a great example from the point of view of chart clarity, see the comments for why - but the principle of how to make the chart stands!]

Now, this isn't a built-in Excel chart type sadly and it's a faff to do, so below is a macro to 1-click do it for you.

Update frequency around here is not impressive, the Poorhouse knows. He's mainly been trapped behind a sea of Excel for a few millenia so it feels. In which case, let's liven things up, by discussing...Excel.

Whoop. Yep, here's a handy tip of something used in recent days. Not original or mindblowing but handy if you don't already know it.

No spreadsheet is complete without a few formulae to manipulate those magic numbers. A formula usually looks like "=A1 + A2" to add the contents of cells A1 and A2. But what if you don't know, at the point of writing your spreadsheet, exactly what cell you want to use? Rather, you want the cell used to vary depending on what has been input in another cell. There are a few different ways, but a quick, easy and perhaps dirty - albeit VBA free - one is utilising the wonders of INDIRECT.

The Poorhouse spends a lot of time looking at dull grey grids of numbers. It's not a hobby per se, but it happens. As per pretty much any other normal business, these numbers appear a lot in Microsoft Excel where hours upon hours of top fun can be had moving them around a bit until they sort of hint at some sort of conclusion that makes you look good. But between staring at these dire digits comes time to prepare for staring at dire digits, which leads to magical shortcuts being discovered.

Comboboxes, aka dropdown boxes, are useful tools for constructing e-forms, restricting idiot-user responses to limited-choice fields and soon. Microsoft Excel has many a way of allowing you to create these, whether this be via the Forms toolbar, Control Toolbox toolbar or the Data -> Validation menu option.

One especially useful feature of such choice-enabling controls is that of making the choices in one box dependent on what the user chose in another. For instance, if a user chose "animals" in box 1, the other could allow "fox", "badger" and "pig" as options, but if they chose "vegetables" in box 1, the other box could only allow "carrots", "cauliflowers" and "cabbages" as choices.

The Internet is great for sending files around, whether they be documents, pictures, sounds, videos or any other such electro-data. What is sometimes less great is when the proud recipient of your favourite picture of your hilarious office antics, or chain letter that if you don't forward to 7 people immediately you will die a painful death, can’t actually see the file because they don't have the right obscure program needed to open it.

This problem is only exacerbated by the profusion of admittedly cool new technologies where for instance a Nokia phone can bluetooth a sound recording to your Apple Mac via a Palm PC and so on. Who knows what format that will turn up in, or how to open it? If horror-of-horrors you aren't even on your own computer the chances of you finding and installing a program that will let you convert such things is minimal. So luckily you don't have to any more, Media Convert will do it for you via the web.

Often in Excel you have a big fat table of data that you need to perform various analyses with. It wouldn't be out of the bounds of reasonability that you would want to count the number of rows that have a certain set criteria. Luckily, Excel provides the COUNTIF function to do exactly that. But it has severe limitations.

Countdown beware; there's a newish favourite daytime gameshow in town to take the shallow attention of you non nine-to-fivers: Deal or No Deal. If nothing else, at least it keeps Noel Edmonds of the cruel streets of England.

In case you've been asleep for years (being in foreign parts is no excuse - there are at least 23 national versions of the show). The premise of the game is as follows: There are a number of boxes with varying amounts of money in, from 1p to £250,000. The contestant picks one box, and it is opened to reveal what it contained, hence giving the contestant the knowledge of what is left to play for. At some point in the game, a mysterious "banker" rings up and offers the contestant a specific amount of money if they will take it and leave.

It came upon the midnight clear
That glorious song of old
I want to calculate the difference between 2 dates in Excel
Or be left out in the cold.

Yes, the Poorhouse was confronted with the above situation; namely that given a date1 and a date2 in Microsoft Excel we needed to know the difference. Not the difference in terms of random Excel microseconds since 2nd August 1957 type numbers, but an actual, readable "3 years 2 months" type difference.