J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

The Spreadsheet Page Is 16 Years Old

Today is the 16th anniversary of The Spreadsheet Page. It's now old enough to drive.

Here's how it looked in 1997, the earliest archived page:

Excel-related RSS Feeds

I keep a fairly comprehensive list of RSS feeds from Excel-related blogs: Excel Blog Headlines.  Today I added a new one, from Doug Glancy. His site has a clever name: yoursumbuddy.

I was going to clean up the list, and remove sites that haven't been updated in a while. But then I decided to leave them in -- just in case they come back to life.  Plus, it required too much effort.

14 Years Old

Today is the 14th anniversary of The Spreadsheet Page. How quickly they grow up!

Here's how it looked in 1997:

Click to enlarge, or try navigating it at archive.org.

I'd say my site design skills have improved over the years.

2009 In Review

Dick Kusleika did a 2009 in Review post, so I'm obligated to imitate him.

Here's an overview of the year's stats:

The average visitor spends 2 minutes and 18 seconds here, and views 2.82 pages.

The top countries are: U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, Germany, Netherlands, France, and Singapore.

In terms of page views, here are the top-10 individual documents at this site for 2009:

1. Spreadsheet Protection FAQ
2. Referring To Ranges In Your VBA Code
3. Cell Counting Techniques
4. Employee Time Sheet
5. A Formulas To Calculate A Ratio
6. Creating A "Megaformula"
7. Alternatives To Nested IF Functions
8. Comparing Two Lists With Conditional Formatting
9. Protecting Cells, Sheets, Workbooks, and Files
10. Excel Easter Eggs

Here's a chart of the number of page views, by day:

The cyclical dips indicate weekends. That big spike was on August 11-13. Page views were about double during that period, and the extra traffic came to view that Megaformula page. Oddly, there was no major referrer for those three days, so it's possible that the link was in a printed article.

That low point was on April 9. Either my site was down most of the day, or Google Analytics was down.

Here's a chart that shows traffic by source:

Surprisingly, Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser (64%). It's followed by Firefox (28%) and Chrome (4%).

Visitor Stats

The Pointy Haired Dilbert blog had its Best month ever.

In June, he had 95,300 visits, 75,287 unique visitors, and 239,325 page views. I ran a report for this site to see how it compares:

Note to other Excel bloggers: If you use Google Analytics, post your June numbers for comparison.

The First Four Weeks

The new and improved Spreadsheet Page went live on July 30. Here's a summary of how things have gone during the first four weeks. The stats are courtesy of Google Analytics -- an incredible free offering that's easily the best web stats software I've ever seen.

This chart shows the number of unique visitors per day. As you can see, things slow down quite a bit on the weekend.

The daily average for unique visitors was 1,778, and the most any any single day was 2,958.

This pie chart shows how the visitors got here:

The top referring sites:

1. j-walk.com (my old site)
2. Daily Dose of Excel
3. J-Walk Blog
4. Microsoft's Excel blog
5. PTS Blog

When people came to this site via a search engine, 80.3% visited only the page they landed on, and the average visit lasted 1 minute, 42 seconds. The top search phrases that brought visitors here:

1. excel easter egg
2. excel vba range
3. vba excel range
4. calculate ratio
5. vba split
6. excel remove hyperlink
7. excel vba offset
8. vba cells
9. password protect excel workbook

The most popular sections of this site, based on page views:

1. Home Page - 216,176
2. Tips - 131,710
3. Downloads - 53,776
4. Oddities - 15,222
5. Jokes - 11,714
6. Books - 10,282
7. Blog - 9,577
8. PUP v6 - 6,503
9. PUP v7 - 4,874
10. EE Newsletter - 4,859
11. Resources - 4,016
12. Support - 2,261

Blog Comment Enhancements

Two new blog comment enhancements:

• A comment RSS feed is now available (see link in the left sidebar)
• I added a comment formatting toolbar in the "add a comment" box.

A Multi-Site Google Search Box

I created a custom Google search box that limits its search to 21 selected Excel sites. Right now it's kind of buried, but you can try it out here: Multi-Site Search. There's also a link to it in this site's main Search page.

Currently, it returns results only from these sites:

• andrewsexceltips.com/
• appspro.com
• beyondtechnology.com
• blogs.msdn.com/excel/
• charts.jorgecamoes.com/
• contextures.com/
• cpearson.com/excel/
• excelforum.com/
• exceltips.vitalnews.com/
• exceluser.com/
• excelusergroup.org
• mcgimpsey.com/excel/
• mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/
• oaltd.co.uk/
• peltiertech.com/
• puremis.net/excel/
• rondebruin.nl
• smurfonspreadsheets.wordpress.com/
• spreadsheetpage.com
• tushar-mehta.com/
• tvmcalcs.com/

Almost certainly, I've omitted some good sites -- but I can easily add more.

Please try it, and let me know what you think. The big question, of course: Is this any more useful that doing a general Google search for an Excel topic?

Spreadsheet Page Traffic Rank

This site is less than a week old, and the Excel mavens are already flocking here. From Alexa:

My goal is to get in the top 5 million by Christmas.

I Think I’m Finished

My to-do list for this site has only two items remaining. And those are both very low priority. So I guess that means I'm finished. Well, as "finished" as a Web site ever gets.

Everything seems to be working smoothly, but I'm sure some more glitches will emerge. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the problems.

The two remaining items:

1. Create thumbnail views of all of the file downloads. It's not really necessary, but I think it will be a nice touch.
2. Figure out why the site's favicon.ico isn't working. The favicon is the little 16x16 image that appears next to the URL in the address bar. It should look like this:

I spent three minutes with an icon editor, and that's as creative as I could get.

I just checked the referrer log, and lots of people are coming here from Daily Dose of Excel. They're showing up at the rate of about one visitor every three minutes. And, surprisingly, I'm even getting a few visitors from Google searches. When I signed up for a Google Analytics account, they must have submitted the site to their robot crawler.

Welcome To The New Spreadsheet Page

If you're reading this, then you've found the new Spreadsheet Page. It was long overdue, and (amazingly) it took only about 12 days to redesign the site and transfer the old information over.

The old site was done with Microsoft FrontPage -- which is so old (and so bad) that Microsoft doesn't even support it any more. For the new site, I use Expression Engine, and the hosting is by Engine Hosting.

I must say that I am very impressed with Expression Engine. I've used it for the J-Walk Blog for several years, but I never had a need to really put it through its paces. Once I understood a few key concepts, it went very smoothly. Perhaps the best testimonial is that there was nothing that I wanted to do that couldn't be done. Best of all, it will be much easier to add new material to this site.

Take some time and browse through the site, then let me know what you think.