Seperating Faceebook and Twitter

Over the last 6 months I have had my Twitter updates (tweets) linked to facebook so that when I updated Twitter it would automatically update my status. I have enjoyed this for the most part because I have gotten some decent discussions going on through facebook because of tweets. However, I find that I hesitate to tweet because I don't want to spam news feeds and the crowd that are friends with me on facebook is drastically different than those on Twitter. 

After a lot of thought I have decided to no longer have my Twitter and facebook accounts linked. What does this mean? If you enjoyed or hated my facebook statuses they will no longer be there; cry or rejoice. I'm assuming most of you won't care or actually be happy about this, but some of you might actually find value in some of my updates. Therefore, I wanted to give a quick overview of Twitter. That way you can sign up for a Twitter account and still see all  of my the tweets.

What is Twitter?

One of the best answers I have heard is that Twitter is a ball of clay. You really do make it into whatever you want it to be. At it's highest level it's a service that allows users to post messages that are no longer than 140 characters in length, similar to SMS. From there you can begin to follow people that tweet about things that interest you. For example, if you are Detroit Pistons fan you can follow @DETPistons or if you love Starbucks you could follow @Starbucks. So I can hear you now, 'what the hell is the @ sign?' This is used to reference or direct a comment at someone. For example, if I wanted to respond to my friends Tom's latest Tweet publicly I would write '@tomshea nice find! I really liked that article.'

How do I sign up?

Go here  and create an account. From there you can start by following me  :)

Here is a nice 2 minute overview of Twitter.

Let me know if you have questions and hopefully I will see you on Twitter soon.

My Version of a VLookUp Tutorial

So today I was given 2 lists and I needed to find out what they had in common and what there differences were. The basic gist of VLOOKUP is that it will take a value and look through a huge table to see if it closely or exactly matches any values in the table.

So how do you do it?

Let's take a simple example; we are going to see how many of our favorite foods are actually fruits. So in column 1 we will have a list of fruits and in column 2 we will have a list of our favorite foods. 

We need to know right the function to take the value in column B and search column A to see if it exists. Remember this is a simple example just to get the concept down, I promise this comes in handy when you have a huge dataset. When you pull up the help center article in Excel for the function this is what they give you "VLOOKUP(lookup_value,table_array,col_index_num,range_lookup)" A bit daunting in my opinion!

Breaking it down we know that VLOOKUP is the name of the function. 

• 'Lookup_valule'  is what our first parameter is going to be that we want to take and see if it exists in our list. In the first row it would be 'pizza.'
  
• 'table_array' this is the master list you are trying to compare against. In our case it is fruits.
• 'col_index_num' says if I find the value that I'm looking for, what column should I return data from. This number is much more useful if you are searching a table that has multiple columns. For example, names of people and their age, we might be looking for their name, but want to return column 2, their age. In our case we are just going to put 1, which states if you find a match, return the fruits name
• 'range_lookup' this can be true or false. This is a bit convoluted, but if you put 'TRUE' it will look for partial matches. If you put 'FALSE' it will require an exact match. In our case we want to put 'FALSE'

Based on all of that the formula that I would put into column C row 2 would be =VLOOKUP(B2, $A$2:$A$7, 1, FALSE). The result you should see is '#NA' which means that it could not find 'pizza' in the list of fruits. Next step is to drag or copy the formula down to column 6 so it is next to each of your favorite fruits. It should look something like this.

The only other thing that you may not be familiar with is the '$' that I used in the formula. This is a way to anchor your formula so when you drag it down it doesn't automatically adjust the values. We didn't use it for B2 because we wanted it to change to C2, D2, etc. However, we wanted the range of fruits to stay the same.

Once you have the data I usually copy and do a paste special to choose just the values and manipulate however I need to. This is by no means the fastest or most eloquent way to do this type of thing, but I thought I would share it since I spent a good deal of time working on this today.