Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and am sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.

Why I found this Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet Cool?
There are probably a million other gift trackers out there, but I liked Steven’s version for few reasons:
- He used conditional formatting to zebra line the gift-table.
- He used array formulas to find-out who is receiving the most expensive gift. The formula relies on VLOOKUP coupled with SUBTOTAL so that when you filter the list to see gifts only for certain age group, the formula shows most expensive gift receiver in that group alone. How cool is that 😎
- He used cell formatting to highlight gifts overshooting budget in RED color.
- He used SUMPRODUCT liberally to summarize the gift data to show us “how many people got the gifts”, “how many gifts are over the budget”, “how many gifts are under-budget”.
Go ahead and download the workbook. Even if you dont have a huge list of gifts to buy this Christmas (REALLY ?!? You dont have a long list? Can I please, please get that wii?). The workbook is full of excel lessons on conditional formatting, formulas and design.
Download the Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet
Click here to download the file. It is protected to make sure you accidentally erase a formula or something. But there is no password. So go ahead and unlock it to learn something cool.
Thank you Steven,
for your most thoughtful and awesome Christmas gift to our community.

















2 Responses to “Top 10 Power BI Interview Questions & Answers”
Hello...
In Power BI I have data that includes months by name only (e.g. May, April, December...)
I need to build charts etc. but i need the months to go chronologically... not alphabetically... I cannot seem to find the fix to this.... once again, my data does NOT have an actual date attached to it (like 02/01/2023)....only month names... can i use a helper table wher i id the month names as numbers 1 thru 12? and if so, how do i manage this to work for me ?
Thank you.
~Keith
You need to setup an extra table to map each month name to a running number. A simple 12 row table like
Jan 1
Feb 2
Mar 3
..
Dec 12
Then create a relationship between this month table and your month column
Now, go to "table view" in Power BI and set the sort by column to month number for the month name column on this new table.
Finally, use the new table's month name whenever you need to refer to the month name in the visuals.
They will be chronologically arranged.