Today we will learn Excel SUBTOTAL formula and 5 beautiful reasons why you should give it a try.
SUBTOTAL formula is used to find out subtotal of a given range of cells. You give SUBTOTAL two things – (1) a range of data (2) type of subtotal. In return, SUBTOTAL will give you the subtotal for that data.
Unlike SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT etc. which do one thing and only one thing, SUBTOTAL is versatile. You can use it to sum up, average, count a bunch of cells.
Here is the SUBTOTAL syntax:
=SUBTOTAL (TYPE OF TOTAL, RANGE OF CELLS)
So, for example, =SUBTOTAL(9,A1:A10) will give us the sum of all values in A1:A10, provided none are filtered(more on this filtering thing below). That is because “9” stands for SUM in SUBTOTAL lingo. If you want a count of values, you can use “2”.
Hmm, that sounds like any other formula, what is so special about it?
Well, SUBTOTAL is not just any other formula, it is a special one. We don’t need to be Jedi masters to tell that force is with SUBTOTAL.
Here I have listed 5 reasons why this is such a special formula.
1) You can use SUBTOTAL to find sum of filtered values
I think the title says it all. See this example to know more.
2) You can use SUBTOTAL to ignore values in hidden rows
Often, we use hide rows feature in excel to remove irrelevant items from view. You can use SUBTOTAL with special type codes so that values in hidden rows are neglected.
For eg. SUBTOTAL(9,A1:A10) finds the sum of values in cells A1:A10 where as SUBTOTAL(109,A1:A10) will find sum of values in visible rows only.
3) You can use SUBTOTAL to dynamically summarize data
Since the “type of total” is a parameter to SUBTOTAL, we can use that to make a dynamic summary like this:
This is very handy in dashboards or when you don’t have space for everything.
4) If there are subtotals in SUBTOTAL range, they will be neglected
This is a killer feature of SUBTOTAL. If you have any SUBTOTAL formulas in the input range of another SUBTOTAL formula, these values are neglected so that double counting is avoided. Need I say more?
5) You can automatically create SUBTOTALs using Excel Data Tools
While SUBTOTAL formula looks kind of neat, writing them when you have tabular data can be a drag. But you don’t have to worry about that. In Excel’s Data menu / ribbon, there is an option on called “Subtotals” that automates the whole process for you.
To generate automatic SUBTOTALS, just select your table of data, go to Data ribbon (or menu) and click on “Subtotals”. This will launch a Subtotal dialog where you can easily specify the type of total grouping you want.
That simple!
Related Excel Formulas:
SUMPRODUCT | VLOOKUP | SUMIF & COUNTIF
Have you used SUBTOTAL formula?
I have never really bothered to test SUBTOTAL formula until few days ago. Now that I found some really cool uses for it, I am itching to implement some of them in future. What about you? Have you used SUBTOTAL formula before? Do you got any tips to share? Please use comments to discuss.
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.