Happy Birthday Hui…
Note: Hui’s birthday is yesterday (13th). I planned to write this post and share the dashboard workbook with you all yesterday itself, but my daughter wasn’t keeping well and we were busy taking care of her. (And yes, she is ok now, thanks for asking. 🙂 )
Some of you know our guest author and Excel ninja Hui. Yesterday was his birthday. And I wanted to create nice birthday gift for him. So I took a database dump of our forums data and created a dashboard.
First take a look the dashboard I made for him:
[click here for a large version]
Some Key Findings
- Our forums have a total of 5,227 posts, out of which Hui contributed 24% (roughly 1 in 4)
- On average Hui takes 13 and half hours to get back to the questioner with an answer. The fastest he has been was 31 seconds. (only last year data)
- Hui has been very busy on November 30th – 2010, answering 19 times on that day.
- The person who got benefited most from Hui is indi visual, with 44 replies from Hui.
- People used the words thank and Hui in same post 395 times.
- Hui wakes up early and answers questions on our forums. Then, before sleep, he spends some time helping people.
- If Hui had $2.5 per each letter he typed in our forums, he would be a millionaire.
- All data as of Jan 11, 2011. Between that and now, Hui has already answered 37 more times (and still helping…)
How is this dashboard constructed?
With lots of love of course. But quite a few excel techniques were used too.
- Structurally, this dashboard is similar to my 10,000 comment dashboard.
- Word cloud of Hui’s replies is from wordle.net
- Scrollable chart at the bottom is a grid of 20×42 cells conditionally formatted. Scrolling effect thru OFFSET formula.
- Pivot tables, a whole lot of them were used to find the summaries I want
- The header content is picture links & shapes.
- Rest of them are left to your imagination.
Download Excel Workbook with this Dashboard
Please click here to download the workbook. It is locked.
I have made a 45 minute video explaining how this dashboard is constructed. I will be giving this video & unlocked workbook as a bonus to people joining Excel School dashboard option or purchasing Dashboard training kit.
Interested in Dashboards?
- I recommend joining Excel School. You can learn how to make awesome charts & dashboards.
- Visit our Dashboards Page. It has tons of useful information, examples, tutorials & templates.
Say Happy Birthday & Thanks to Hui
I am sure directly or indirectly, Hui has helped many of you. So take a minute and say thanks to him. Wish him several more years of awesomeness, happiness, wealth & health. 🙂
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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