Situation
We know that VLOOKUP formula is useful to fetch the first matching item from a list. So what would you do if you need 2nd (or 3rd etc.) matching item from a list?
For eg. If you have below data, and you want to find out how much sales John made 2nd time, then VLOOKUP formula becomes quite useless. Or is it?!?
Data:
Solution
A simple solution to this problem would be sorting our data on sales person’s name. That way all Johns would line up one beneath another. And we just have to find the first John’s position and add 1 to it to get to 2nd occurrence. Like this =MATCH("John", C5:C17, 0) + 1
But sorting is not an option all the time. So there should be a better way to do this?
Well, there is. We just add a helper column before the sales person name and fill it with sales-person’s name & occurrence. (see the below data table).
For this we can use COUNTIF() Formula, like this: =C5&COUNTIF($C$5:C5,C5). Notice the $C$5:C5?, well the mix of absolute & relative references does the trick here and gets John1, John2… etc.
Now, to lookup 2nd occurance of John, all we do is, simply write =VLOOKUP("John2",...) and we are done.
Sample File
Download Example File – Getting the 2nd matching item from a list using VLOOKUP formula
The file includes few examples on how to fetch 2nd, 3rd etc. matches using lookup formulas. It also has some interesting (and challenging) home work for you. Download & play with it.
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6 Responses to “Nest Egg Calculator using Power BI”
Wow! What a Powerful article!
Hello Chandoo Sir
your file does not work with Excel 2016.
how can I try my hands on this powerful nest egg file ?
thanks
Ravi Santwani
@Ravi... this is a Power BI workbook. You need Power BI Desktop to view it. See the below tutorial to understand what Power BI is:
https://chandoo.org/wp/introduction-to-power-bi/
As always, superb article Chandoo... 🙂
Just one minor issue:
While following your steps and replicating this calculator in PowerBI, I found that the Growth Pct Parameters should be set as "Decimal number" not "Whole Number"
OR
we have to make corresponding adjustments in the Forecast formulas (i.e. divide by 100) to get accurate results.
You are right. I used whole number but modified the auto created harvester measure with /100 at end. Sorry I did not mention it in the tutorial.
Instead of
[Growth Pct 1 Value]/12
the monthly rate has to be
(1+[Growth Pct 1 Value])^(1/12)-1
It's a slight difference but in 30 years the future value will be $100k less.