This post is part of spreadcheats series.
Today we will learn a fascinating little feature in excel called “goal seek”.
But what good is a feature if we cant find a use for it? So we will build a simple retirement calculator using excel.
Before plunging in to the complex retirement calculations, let us spend a bunch of words understanding what this goal seek is all about.
What is goal seek in excel?
We can think of goal seek as opposite of formulas. Formulas tell you what is the output of a bunch of variables used in an equation (for eg. sumproduct is an equation involving + and *). Goal seek tells you what inputs you need to give in order to get certain output.
For example, you can use goal seek to solve a linear equation or find the internal return rate (IRR) of an investment.
Now that you understand goal seek, let us plan your retirement. 🙂
Make a financial model to estimate your monthly savings to meet retirement goals.
(Note: the image shows commas according to Indian currency formatting.)
In order to proceed, we would need some data, like,
(1) What is your current age?
(2) What is your expected retirement age?
(3) How much do you think you will spend every month when you retire (of course in today’s prices)
(4) Your expectation of inflation (%)?
(5) Your expected return (%) on investments?
Once the data is available, we will need to calculate the following,
I have shown the worksheet on the right with some dummy data.
(6) The yearly expenses at the time of retirement: (3) * (1+(4))^((2)-(1))*12
(7) Corpus required to generate the above amount every year (and leave the principle behind): (6)/(5)
(If these calculations are overwhelming, download the excel retirement calculator workbook here.)
We know how much corpus is needed.
We can use FV() formula to determine the future value of a series of payments made periodically and compounded at a given interest rate.
We know how much the FV() out come should be, but we don’t know how much the input (monthly investment) should be.
This is where goal seek is going to help us.
Let us assume the monthly investment amount will be in cell A5. Let us also assume, the interest rate is in cell A4, retirement age is in A3, current age is in A2.
We will write the FV formula in cell A6 like this = -FV(A4/12,(A3-A2)*12,A5)
(we have to negate FV since it uses weird accounting notations)
Since the cell A5 is blank, the FV will show the value as 0.
Now, we will use goal seek to find out how much cell A5 should have so that A6 will be calculated to the corpus amount required.
Go to Data tab and click on What if analysis and select goal seek. (In excel 2003, it should be in tools menu)
See this screen cast to understand how the goal seek works:
The goal seek window has 3 inputs. The cell you need to change. The cell you want to set and the value to set.
Once you use the goal seek it will find the correct (or closest) value to meet the goal and displays it. If you press OK, the value will be placed in the cell (in our case, in A5)
That is all.
Download the Retirement Calculator Excel Worksheet and play with it
Click here to download the retirement calculator worksheet. Follow the instructions in the workbook to see this example for yourself. Change values to find the amount that you need to save.
Do you find goal seek feature useful?
What do you do with excel goal seek? Do you use it in your modeling, planning worksheets? Tell me your experiences and ideas using comments.
Additional resources:
- Read remaining posts in Spreadcheats series: Become a spreadsheet guru by learning these nifty hacks.
- Excel financial formulas – Help on NPV, FV, PV and more
- Understand why you should start early when it comes to retirement savings
- Buy or rent calculator in Excel – calculate returns on property investments
PS: the retirement calculation steps are derived from this excellent article on smart investor
30 Responses to “Rescue oddly shaped data – Battle between Formulas, VBA and Power Query”
Nice use of Power Query! Power Query is simply awesome! But somehow a lot of people are punishing themselves by not using it (not learning it).
An imperfect 4th approach for consideration... no codes at all...
Select myrange.
Go to Special --> Blank
Delete Cell --> Shift cell left
90% done... now we just need to move the data of 2nd column to the bottom of 1st column
Of course... Power Query is the best.
Cheers,
There is another way but it involves multiple steps:
Copy the values in column E, move the cursor to F5, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
Copy the values in column D, move the cursor to F8, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
And so on.
This works perfectly, albeit a little clumsily apart from the values in B17 and C16, which can be moved with simple copy and paste
Power Query Forever! I do not know how I survived for so long without knowing and using this tool, I can not recommend it to my colleagues, but by the way they prefer to suffer to learn.
My congratulations here from Brazil.
I rolled my eyes when I saw that data
Using decimal places is a nice trick to order data, thanks for that
And tweaking the first formula a bit, you can use OFFSET instead of INDIRECT
=OFFSET($A$1, MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange)), ROWS(A$1:A1))-1, RIGHT(TEXT(MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001), ROWS(A$1:A1)), ".00000"), 5)-1)
Tried the above formula with the downloaded oddly shaped data file and I could not get it to work. I get #value without ctrl+shift+enter, and #ref with ctrl+shift+enter.
Sorry, it was SMALL, not MIN.
Add with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.
Thank you for your formula. Like the indirect formula I tested this one in older versions of EXCEL and it worked without ALTERATION in EXCEL 95. Very impressive.
Too complicated
Use =Sum to summarize all the sells to the left and Bobs Your Uncle
@Bertie... I am afraid that won't work when you have more than one value in a row.
I tested this formula in versions of Excel all the way back to Excel 95
=IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
So there are multiple ways of cleaning up messy data by formulas.
Wow.. Excel 95. Who knew people still use that. But as you have shown, Excel has all these beautiful and powerful functions for 23 years. It has data sciency stuff before DS was even a thing.
I had a problem with pasting the formula in the original post.
Formula should be: =IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
EXCEL even in a 16 bit version, is a very robust and capable program.
I don't like the VBA code. If you have a blank row in MyRange, the last entry in the range is doubled up in the paste.here range.
Not really. The macro is writing one cell at a time from paste.here. You have to clean the range before, which I was too lazy to write. But a line like Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents should do the trick.
Adding Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents fixed the problem.
for step split column by delimiter i am not getting option of split into rows or columns. Can you help me in this
Thanks Chandoo for promoting Power Query.
To simplify further, you can "Unpivot Columns" instead of right click on the newly created column and split it by comma in to rows in step 3 of Power Query.
i used
=LOOKUP(10000,B5:F5)
and got the answers. I just plagiarized this formula somewhere and use it, maybe you can explain why it works.
Regards
@Johan... I am not sure if the formula works correctly. When I tested it with the sample data in this post, it showed #N/As in two cells. Essentially, it will only give first value in each row. So if a row has multiple values, then subsequent values are missed. LOOKUP() function goes thru a list and finds the first value that is less than or equal to the input - in this case 10000 in B5:F5.
I have the need to convert pdf's to excel on occasion and they often come out a mess like this. I have used:
Cell G2 =COUNT(myrange)
Cell G3 =IFERROR(IF(G2-1<1,"",G2-1),"") copied down to G100
Cell H2 =IFERROR(LARGE(myrange,G2),"") copied down to H100
Waouw...
=IFERROR(INDIRECT("R" & SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange "", ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),
ROWS(A$1:A1)), "00000.00000"), ".", "C"), FALSE), "")
but CTRL Shift Enter with {} before and after 🙂 😀
Here's a way with pivot table
https://www.bookkempt.com/2018/02/aligning-non-contiguous-data.html
This is brilliant. Bookmarked 🙂
Another possibility.
This assumes that you have a row index 'k' to use in the SMALL function and a column index 'h' to identify the columns of 'myRange'.
If you define 'coord' to refer to
=k+h/10 [assuming h<10]
then it will be possible to recover values later based upon location within 'myRange'. The formula 'nb' that identifies non-blanks by coordinates is given by
= SMALL( IF(myRange"", coord), k )
Finally, to unpick the pieces
= INDEX( myRange, INT(nb), 10*MOD(nb, 1) )
Whilst I am here and making trouble the PQ solution is also a tad over-complicated. All that is needed is to unpivot the entire table and remove the Attribute column.
The advanced editor would show
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myRange"]}[Content],
#"Unpivoted Columns" = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Source, {}, "Attribute", "Value"),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Unpivoted Columns",{"Attribute"})
in
#"Removed Columns"
1.fill the blank cells with 0
2.the requested column value=sum of those mess number column
but this can be used in only one column has value
Chandoo
And if we use the formula SEARCH (100000000, B5: F5)
JC
Another approach with Power Query, it will still work if the number of columns changed:
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myrange"]}[Content],
#"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(Source, "List", each Record.ToList(_)),
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Added Custom",{"List"}),
#"Expanded LIst" = Table.ExpandListColumn(#"Removed Other Columns", "List"),
#"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(#"Expanded LIst", each ([List] null))
in
#"Filtered Rows"
Cool idea to use Record.ToList as added column. Thanks for sharing this.
Nowadays, you can just use TOCOL on Excel 2024, MS 365, and Web Excel. It has a parameter to ignore blanks/errors/both.