This post is a testament that readers of this blog are way cooler and enterprising than I am. Justin, who I must say, has some really amazing excel skills, contacted me in April with a VBA Script he made that can draw two circle Venn diagrams in excel. He wrote,
I regularly need to show the intersection between different populations (venn diagrams) and have struggled to find anything useful in XL2000 or XL2003
Most examples are static pictures of circles created in a graphics program to which users add labels – hardly ideal
While still a WIP – I’ve come up with a simple 2 circle venn tool.
It uses drawing objects [msoShapeOval] (nice to get the transparency)
I saw the script and was really impressed by the way it worked. I wrote back to him asking if it is ok to share this with the readers on PHD. And he said OK. Ever since I have been wanting to share this wonderful little tool with all of you.
Without further ado…
Venn Diagrams in Excel
1. First download the Venn diagrams in excel zip file from here [xls version here].
2. Now when you try to open the file, you must enable macros (in excel 2007, you may want to set the security to low and then reopen the file)
3. Click on the big button you see in the first sheet and specify the venn diagram details (how many in each circle, what is the intersection amount)
4. Click the “Draw Venn” button and you have a sparkling venn diagram ready
Once again, I really appreciate Justin for putting together such a nice tool and sharing it will all of us. Thank you 🙂
PS: If you like this, do say thank you to Justin in comments. I am sure he can take pretty much any amount of appreciation.
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...