Finally, our second visualization challenge comes to an end. We got a winner.
Background about Zoho Reports Visualization Challenge:
(skip this section if you know what I am going to say)
Back in November, 2009, I have asked the readers to come up with best possible ways to visualize a set of fictitious sales data. The objective is to make a dashboard (or chart) that would,
help a senior manager understand how the sales people have done in the 24 months. [more]
Readers from all corners of earth responded enthusiastically to this challenge and submitted 32 truly outstanding entries. I have compiled all of them in the sales dashboards post and asked you to vote for a winner.
And now we have winners.
Ladies & Gentlemen, the winner of this challenge is,
Option 4 submitted by Alex Kerin
Here is the winning sales dashboard:
click here for a bigger version
Alex Kerin – who writes at Data Driven Consulting, made this dashboard using MS Excel and Fabrice’s free sparklines add-in.
The dashboard clearly shows sales performance summaries at sales person level (a stated objective of this challenge), along with various key metrics. It follows key visualization principles, he used fewer colors, kept things as simple as possible and include headline messages.
Download Source Files: Link 1 | Link 2 | Link 3
Alex’s entry received 23 votes.
Congratulations Alex. You will receive an 8 GB iPod touch very soon.
The second prize goes to,
Option 7 submitted by Cuboo
Here is the dashboard:
click here for a bigger version
Cuboo – who writes at Open BI, made this dashboard using MS Excel & Palo. Cuboo is not new, he won the previous visualization challenge as well.
Download Source Files: Link 1
Cuboo’s entry received 22 votes.
Congratulations Cuboo. You will receive a copy of project management excel templates.
The third prize goes to,
Option 10 submitted by Esteban
Here is the dashboard:
click here for a bigger version
Esteban, made this dashboard using MS Excel.
Download Source Files: Link 1 | Link 2
Esteban’s entry received 15 votes.
Congratulations Esteban. You will receive a copy of project management excel templates.
Honorary Mentions
While there are several very good dashboards (and charts) submitted for this challenge, I *personally* liked these dashboards too.
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| (large) | (large) | (large) | (large) | (large) |
| Option 2 by Ajay | Option 5 by Arti | Option 11 by Hernan | Option 23 by Matt Cloves | Option 30 by Tessaes |
| Good colors, Layout | Interesting design, lots of dynamic stuff | Fewer charts, cool headlines | Rotatable panel chart!!! | Fewer colors, data tables |
| (details) | (details) | (details) | (details) | (details) |
Thanks to Zoho – the contest sponsor
Thanks to Zoho Reports and @aravind for pro-actively approaching me and sponsoring this contest.
Thanks to all the participants and voters
Thanks everyone for your support, participation and enthusiasm. You have made this contest a memorable experience for me as well as countless PHD readers. Thank you.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.