Occasionally I check the Google Trends page, to see what’s the hot news of the day (or hour). If you’re stuck for a blog idea, or dinner conversation topic, you might get some inspiration there.
It’s not too surprising, but today’s hot topic is the iPad, in a variety of spellings.
You can also see the hot searches, which are usually quite different than the hot topics. Today is the 24th anniversary of the Challenger explosion, so it makes sense that people are searching for information on that topic. But amaryllis flowers?
Website Trends
At the bottom of the Google Trends page, there’s a link to Trends for Websites. That takes you to a page that shows trends for Wikipedia.org. You can put your website in the search box, to see the overall trends, or focus on a specific page on your site.
You’ll see information similar to the data in Google Analytics, such as unique visitors and visitor regions. Here’s the visitor trend for the first part of last year on the Contextures site.
Check Similar Sites
When you view your site trends, you’ll see a list of other sites that people visited. You can put one of those sites in the search box, and see how it compares to your site.
For example, I took a look at Chip Pearson’s Excel site. Most of his visitors came from USA, India, UK, and Canada, and they also searched for Excel formulas.
Dick’s Daily Dose of Excel visitors are mainly from the USA, with a few from the UK, and they don’t search for anything else.
My visitors at Contextures.com are from the same regions as Chip’s and have very diverse interests. I have no explanation for their search topics!
Take a Look
Check your site, and a few of the similar sites. Do you find anything that surprises you?
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Please Don’t Send Your Giant Files
Just like you, I get a fair amount of spam and other junk in my email inbox every day. There are regular requests for Excel help too, that I’ve written about before.
Some of those Excel help requests come with a file attachment, but most files are fairly small – in the 50-200 Kb size. I’ll admit to opening some of them, if the help request is interesting, and the problem is well described.
Today I got an email with a 2 Mb Excel attachment, from someone I’d never heard of, let alone had any prior interaction with. He was offering me an “interactive workbook” that I could put on my Sample Excel Files page.
Through careful research, he learned that my name is “Hi”, so that impressed me. (Many people believe that my name is “Sir”, so “Hi” is an improvement.)
I deleted the email immediately, so I can’t quote it exactly, but it had only a short paragraph with a vague description of the attachment. There were no details about sender or the file that made me want to take a look.
Sharing Your File
There are some files on my Sample Excel Files page that other people have created. You can learn amazing things by taking a look at someone else’s work.
Both Ron Coderre and Roger Govier have generously provided so many sample files that I created separate pages for them. Dave Peterson has contributed several files too, like his popular Navigation toolbar. But even they wouldn’t send a random 2 Mb file without asking if I’m interested.
If you have an Excel workbook that you’d like to share on my website, please let me know. Maybe it would be perfect for my website visitors.
If we haven’t met, or emailed, before, tell me a little about yourself, and the kind of file that you’ve created. I try to keep the sample files pretty small, so they’re quick and easy for people to download, so I probably won’t be able to use your file if it’s too big.
Does This Happen to You?
Do you ever get giant Excel files that you didn’t ask for, and weren’t expecting? How do you handle that?
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