Sometimes when we import data from another source in to excel, the dates are not imported properly. This can be due to any number of reasons, including,
- The date format is different from one that is understood by excel
- The data has some extra spaces, other characters before and after the date values.
- The dates are formatted for another country (or date system) and hence your version of Excel wont recognize them.
- The separator between date, month and year is not a known separator (for eg. 12=DEC=2009 instead of 12-Dec-2009), etc.
In this post, we will learn some tricks and ideas you can use to quickly convert text to dates.
Technique 1: Use Text to Columns Utility
- First copy the source data and paste it in a text file (open Notepad and paste there).
- Now copy the values from text file and paste them in Excel.
- At this point, Excel will prompt you for using “Text to columns” utility (or Text Import Wizard as it is called in Excel 2007)
- Go to the Text Import Wizard (or Text to Columns dialog).
- Leave defaults or make changes in step 1 & 2.
- In step 3, select “Date” and specify the format of the date – like YMD, MDY, DMY, YDM, MYD or DYM. It doesn’t matter what is the format of source date, month or year is. Excel can smartly understand them.
- Click “Finish”.
That is all. Your text dates are now converted to excel understandable dates.
Technique 2: Using Formulas to Convert Text to Dates
- Paste the data in a column (say “A”)
- Now depending on the format of source data, write one of the below formulas to convert text to dates.
Using DATEVALUE formula
DATEVALUE formula tells excel to fetch the date from a given input. It is a smart formula capable of converting dates stored as text to excel understandable date format. To convert a text in cell A1 to date, you just write =DATEVALUE(A1)
However, DATEVALUE formula has some limitations. It cannot process all types of dates. For eg. I have shown a few sample dates along with corresponding DATEVALUE output.
Readjusting Date Text so that it works with DATEVALUE formula
Whenever possible, your next best option is to re-adjust the source data text so that it can be understood by DATEVALUE formula. Here is an example.
We can use the text formulas like LEFT, RIGHT and MID to extract portions of the date text and then regroup them using & operator to create meaningful date text format that would be understood by DATEVALUE formula.
Technique 3: Using DATE formula to Convert Text to Dates
If your data has separate columns for date, month and year, you can use DATE formula to convert the data to dates like this:
=DATE(year,month,day)
For eg. =DATE(2009,12,31) will give the date 31st December, 2009.
Bonus Technique: Converting Dates to Text
If you want to convert excel dates to text values (for your report or some other purpose), you can use the TEXT formula like this:
=TEXT(A1,"DD-MMM-YYYY") will convert date in Cell A1 to DD-MMM-YYYY format. You can pass any other date / time formats to TEXT formula as well. [more: tutorials on TEXT() formula]
How do you deal with troublesome dates?
Of course, if it is a real date, we can always bolt. But if it is a date in the data, we need some tools to deal with it. I used to rely on formula based methods to clean the dates. But recently I discovered the import-text date conversion method. This is very powerful and straightforward. Now, I use it whenever possible to clean up my date data.
What about you? How do you deal with buggy / faulty dates in Excel?
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17 Responses to “Budget vs. Actual Profit Loss Report using Pivot Tables”
Good Work, Yogesh & Chandoo! Thanks.
Hi everybody,
first sorry I am late to say something about this topic;actually I was waiting last part
second I am not accountant I am an Engineer
third """"Very Important""" the idea is not about Loss but I am sure it is profit
Based on third it shows:
1- How to use EXCEL
2- How to use pivot TABLES
3- How to collect and arrange DATA
4- How to make reports
Many Thanks
Hi Yogesh and Chandoo,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
You guys are great!
thanks chandoo and yogesh, thanks for you lessons, are great!....i have a idea for a budget. I try to do it..... thanks for all
Thanks a lot for sharing the most powerful tool worldwide "knowledge"
Warm greetings from Peru
Hi -
This is a really great article because it's a simple and common thing you'd want to do with a pivot table but not at all obvious how to do it! So - muchas gracias to Chandoo and Yogesh!
One thing - I couldn't get past the group error in the sample file. I would click on ungroup but it didn't seem to have any effect. I'd appreciate it if anybody has any pointers here.
-Juanito
Hi Chandoo
I am also having the group error. Can't seem to ungroup? Appreciate if you explain further on the steps required in order to get to calculated items.
Many thanks and keep up the great work.
Cheers
Adam
Hi Chandoo,
I'm struggling resolving the problem depicted below:
I have a set of data, with (among others) a "Region" field (can be APJ, EMEA, or AMS), and a "Country" field.
Unfortunately, I need to group data by the following 4 Regions: APeJ, Japan, EMEA and AMS.
I first tried to make a pivot with Region and Country in the rows (or columns), and then group Country data as per the above.
Alas, as soon as I have a new Country that appear in my data set, my groupings are broken, and I have to redo the job of ungrouping, grouping etc.
I thought I could try to use calculated item, by adding first a new column to my dataset concatenating Region_Country, and create an "APeJ" calculated item that would sum all the "APJ_*" and substract the "APJ_Japan", but again, no clue, as I can't find a way to use any wild card in those formulas.
Given that I already found extremely helpful tips and tricks in your site that helped me manage that bunch of data, I'm pretty sure you'll have a bright idea on how I can solve that one!
Thanks in advance for your lights!
Hi Catherine...
In such cases, I advice using an additional column in the data itself. You can set-up a grouping table else where with country in first column, region in second column. And then in the data, you can add an extra column and use VLOOKUP to fetch the region based on the country.
Then feed this entire data (with extra column) to pivot table and use the extra column to group the data.
Hi Chandoo,
Thank you for your prompt answer.
I finally came to the same conclusion - after a rest 🙂 . I was probably too tired Friday evening (it was rather late), having spent hours in manipulating all my surveys data so as to pull rolling averages, make nice graphs and so on, and was trying to find a complex solution when there was a simple one.
Thanks again,
Catherine
Hey,
Great post!
I for example have different database structure with the following fields :
Date, Expense, Income, Sum (Income - Expense), Category (Sales, Cost of Goods and etc).
Creating a P&L report for the whole year works great. Including gross margin % and etc.
Though, creating P&L report by QTR/Month is becoming impossible since i get the following error : “This PivotTable report field is grouped. You cannot add calculated item to grouped filed.”
Is there a solution for this kind of problem?
Like Adam and Juanito, I also cannot ungroup.
Would appreciate it if you can add a few more lines and a screenshot or two on where to put the mouse cursor to ungroup.
Hi, I have figured out the ungrouping problem. One of the earlier steps was to group by month, if you pull the month back down to the column then right click and then select ungroup, then pull the month back up so you end up with just data source and budget/actual as the headings, then you can continue on.
To solve the ungroup problem, my method is:
Copy the "data" sheet to a whole new Excel workbook
and directly work on Part 6.
And since it is a fresh copy, Excel don't show me the "can't ungroup" problem. Hope this help.
Thank you Yogesh for this wonderful tutorial.
Kent, Malaysia
Just when i thought pivots were awesome i learn about inserting the calculated fields and that makes them more awesome. chandoo where have you been all my life.
Hello - your P&L pivot version has really impressed my boss and would like to use it. I have applied it for a actual vs budget vs forecast model I have created. One problem. In your variance above the operating profit percent % variance shows 33.8% but I want it to show (0.01) point or the true diff from prior budget.
I know I can add calculation to the side but boss would like to see it in pivot table.
Please help
Thanks
I have a further query which may solve my above dilemma. Is it possible to add a column that calculates percent increase. So in the example above a new column would be added to show variance %.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks