Some of you know that I have a full time job as a business analyst with one of the largest IT companies in the world. I help insurance companies do their IT better in that job. Almost a week ago, I have resigned from my day time job.
Back story:
As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to run my own company. It is one of the reasons why I pursued MBA. But over the course of years, the part in me that is curious, risk taking and stubborn has vanished and was replaced by cautious, calculated and flexible self. May be it is all the education and social set up, or may be it is just me. The change has been subtle but very powerful. So much that when I finished MBA in 2006, I did not consider setting up my own company, even for a second. I was bending backwards to impress the recruiters and get a steady 9 to 5 job.
Year 2007 – the year of change:
The transformation from cautious to curious has been gradual and began in 2007. I went to USA for the first time in my life and met several interesting and enterprising people. I also realized the potential of web based startups. They are low cost, easy to setup and run and can be managed on part-time basis. Around the same time , my crush with Excel happened. So I started writing about it on my personal blog (yes, PHD used to be a personal blog before 2007. Dig deep in to archives and you will find a lot stories, experiences and trivia). But I also started a small website in the movie domain. The movie site didnt go that well, but PHD kept on rocking.
In the meanwhile, my day job kept me busy and gave me lots of challenging assignments. So I pushed PHD to the side track and worked on it in the nights and weekends. But somewhere in my heart I knew that I would have to quit my job and pursue PHD as a full time venture. But the cautious side of me never let it happen.
Years 2008 and 2009 – Foundation years:
Along the years (in 2008 and 2009) I cleared my student loans and most of the mortgage (house loan). I also made some buffer money by working in foreign locations and monetizing PHD’s traffic thru ads. All this was poured in to our bank accounts to create little cushion for us. Even then I wasnt thinking about quitting my job and starting a company.
Then I became dad in late 2009. Simultaneously I launched excel project management templates for sale. As my kids grew, the sales of PM Templates also went up. This was encouraging.
Year 2010 – Finally,
So in year 2010 I took some of the money made from PM Templates and invested in the Excel School program. Again many of you have welcomed the program with both hands and I saw a generous boost in part time business. But even then I wasn’t quite sure if working on PHD alone is a good idea.
Then something strange happened. Between day job, work on PHD I was spending very little time my family. My work demanded that I be in Denmark for extended time and I could hardly find any time to be with Jo and the kids. I was being a bad dad and husband. And that feeling was killing me inside.
So in March 2010 I came back to India on vacation. My initial plan was to take a 6 month sabbatical from day job and spend that time with my wife and kids. But after spending a month with them I couldn’t imagine going back to work. So I sent in my resignation last week.
What next?
I jokingly tell my wife that instead of working for one boss, I have now 9500 bosses. Each with different and very high expectations. 🙂
- Well, I will devote more time to PHD and update it regularly. I will strive to maintain the quality of posts and interaction here.
- I will also launch few new products (may be one product every 2 months) to keep the income stream trickling.
- I will be running Excel School on regular basis (or make it as an on-demand product).
- I will be doing more Excel Consulting work (Do you need a dashboard or report to be done? Drop me an email to get a quote).
- I will be able to conduct on-site training sessions any where in India.
- But most importantly I will be there to smile when Jo, Nishanth and Nakshatra wake up from sleep, and when they go to bed. every day. And that makes me happy 🙂
PS: I am planning to chronicle my journey as an entrepreneur at startup desi. Follow me there if you like to know how to run a one man shop online.
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.