Denice, an Excel School student emailed me an interesting problem.
I have a bunch of data from which I want to find the sum of values that meet a criteria. But I also want to exclude any rows that are hidden.
Well, we know how to find sum of values that meet a criteria – we use either SUMIF, SUMIFS or SUMPRODUCT formula.
We also know how to find the sum of values while excluding hidden rows – we use SUBTOTAL Formula
But sum of values meeting a criteria and not in a hidden rows?!?
Of course, we can get such a total in excel, we just need to mash up SUBTOTAL Formula with SUMIFS (or SUMPRODUCT) and add a dash of coffee to it.
Step 1:Add an extra column to your data
Our first step is to find which rows are hidden and which are not. We can do this using SUBTOTAL Formula.
Assuming your data is in the range A2:B15
Add an extra column next to your data and write the formula =SUBTOTAL(102,B2). This formula will return “1” if cell B2 is visible and “0” if hidden.
Now drag the formula to fill rest of the cells in the extra column. At this point our data table should look like this:
Step 2 [Excel 2007+]: Write the SUMIFS Formula
Now, our summing criteria is very simple. We want to find the sum of all values where product=”Pod Gun” and Visible?=”1″
The formula is =SUMIFS(B2:B15.A2:A15,"Pod Gun",C2:C15,1)
If you do not get this formula, take a sip of that coffee and look long and hard it. If you need some clues, check out the Introduction to SUMIFS Excel Formula page.
Step 2 [All versions of Excel]: Write the SUMPRODUCT Formula
Just in case you do not have Excel 2007 or above, you have to write SUMPRODUCT formula instead of SUMIFS. Here is the formula:
=SUMPRODUCT((B2:B15)*(A2:A15="Pod Gun")*(C2:C15=1))
Again, take a sip, widen your eyes and try to gaze seriously at the pixels. Here is the Introduction to SUMPRODUCT Excel Formula page if you need help.
Step 3: Finish the coffee before it gets cold.
or if you are drinking cold coffee, finish it before it tastes funny.
Download Example Workbook:
Here is the example workbook. Download and play with it to learn.
Share your tips & experiences:
I use “hide rows” option almost regularly to remove un-necessary info. from view. But I never had the need to exclude the values in hidden rows from my formulas.
What about you? How have you handled similar problems before?
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.