This is a guest article by Theodor on how to Compare Sales of One Product with Another
Ok, now here’s one for you.
Suppose you’d like to come up with a sales report on different products, comparing their evolution on the same period of different years (say Jan ’09 vs. Jan Jan ’10). At the same time, you’d like to keep an eye on their yearly trend (entire 2009 vs. entire 2010).
No big deal, you’ll say, but here’s the twist: the products have not been available for the entire time span taken into consideration. Let’s say you’ve only had Product 1 available for sale for Feb ’09 onwards, while it had been discontinued from October ’10. If you’re really looking for a Like-For-Like (LFL) comparison, you’d only want to compare the months where you have data for both years. It’s false to claim you’ve had a sales boost of 300% when you entered the market with Product X in October 2009, selling 1000 units over 3 months and compare that to the full results of 2010, when you’ve sold 3000 units. In the first scenario you were averaging some 333 units/month, while later you’ve dropped to a mere 250/month. Nothing to brag about there, is it?
Ah, but we also have different product classes. One is aimed for the high-profile buyer (A-Class products), the second for the middle level (B-Class) and so on. Given that different products were added to each class’s portfolio and then later discontinued, we should see the total LFL development of each product class in the same graphical representation.
Hold on another second. One country is defining its quarters as Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun etc, while other might relate a quarterly result to a specific day in the company history (such as the company launch date, or since the new CEO took over or whatever). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to compare equivalent datasets in any user-defined time span?
So how do you compare sales of one product with another?
Now I’ve always said that the second hardest thing mankind has ever done was to send men on the Moon and safely return them home. That’s only because the MOST difficult thing in the world has become to compare apples with apples. There are so many subtle differences between one dataset and the other (even though they both relate to the same source), that if one reporting template is to have a long life, it should first and foremost come with the built-in ability to allow the end user to drill down through the data and change criteria in order to get relevant results for today’s issue. And all that will change tomorrow, as there will lay a new and unexpected issue on the table.
With that in mind, when I create my templates I follow the self-made golden rule (which later I found many others have applied for themselves long before I knew Excel ever existed) – keep the raw data in one sheet, preferably hidden; use a second sheet for calculation, ALWAYS hidden, and provide a simple and useful graphical interface for the end-user in the third sheet. This will avoid any mishaps such as “Could you please put your formulas back in, I donno which button I pressed and….!!”
Comparing Sales of One Product with Another – Demo:
First see the demo of this technique. Then, we can learn how I created it.
Coming to the attached example – which only works in Excel 2007 and later, by the way:
- Your data is in sheet ‘data’, ordered by product and timeline (Jan-Dec, 2009 and 2010). I’ve created the values using the =randbetween() formula, and then copy-pasted the values only so they will not change anymore.
- To keep things more clear, I’ve placed the calculation formulas in the same sheet as that with the graph, just so you can compare values and figure out formulas more quickly, without having to switch between sheets all the time.
How the Sales Comparison Chart is made?
Now, to bring up values of a particular product, I’ve created a list in C44:C70 (values in column B are just for guidance). We can compare two products, which can be chosen from a couple of drop-down boxes linked to cells B6 and B8. Here’s where the values in column B help: basically, they tell me which item index from the drop-down corresponds to a product. I then placed the same item indexes in data!A7:A46. This is all because I am lazy and I find the sumifs() formula a blessing: all I have to do now is to add up the results that correspond to (1) the chosen Product in the drop-down, which is looked up by the index, and (2) the year, which is in data!E6:E45. [More on INDEX Formula]
An alternative in Excel 2003 would have been to concatenate the value of “Product 1″&”2009” for example, to get a unique identifier and not return the sales value of 2010 by mistake. Then vlookup() after the concatenated value. [Related: How to lookup based on multiple conditions]
These calculations are placed in ‘Yr sls’!F51:Q54. Note there’s an initial IF() there, to only display the values if the respective month is selected. There are two sliders up in the second row, which can help you ‘cut’ your desired portion of the year for comparison.
‘Yr sls’!F61:Q68, using sumifs() again, I added the sales values for each product class. Finally, in ‘Yr sls’!F45:Q48 are the final calculation, where if an item index lower than 8 (corresponding to Product 1) is selected, the values in F61:Q68 are brought up, else the values in F51:Q54.
So now we see our resulting values above the chart, in cells F6:Q9. The deviation is calculated in F5:Q5. But for the yearly totals, I only want to compare apples with apples, i.e. months in which sales have been recorded in both years. For that I used cells U6:AF9. The totals in R6:R9 are based on these isnumber() results. This allows you to have the exact deviation between similar months over an user-defined time span.
Ok, time to close. But not before your boss knows the exact portfolio of each product class! Look shortly in data!B6:B45. This is where, using countif(), we have the number of occurrences for each product class. Knowing that product class “A” will be repeated say 3 times, we’ll use this knowledge to look up the third occurrence of “A” and bring up the product next to it. Now take a peak in sheet “Legend”. Knowing we have to lookup for A 1, that’s how I wrote the formula. But also knowing that “A” will be repeated twice for each product (once for 2009, another for 2010) and not wanting to see duplicates in my product list, there’s a very simple solution: just use odd numbers!! This will only bring up every 2nd occurrence of a product. As I said, I like it simple 🙂 I just left the numbers in C5:C15 visible so you don’t have to fish around for them, the rest are simply I the same color as the background. A bit of conditional formatting does the rest.
Of course, before presenting this to any decision maker, you’d hide the rows and columns they’re not supposed to touch and present them with a clean looking table.
Download the Excel Workbook:
Click here to download the workbook with this example. Examine the formulas and chart in “Yr Sls” worksheet to understand how this is weaved together.
[Added by Chandoo]
Thank you Theodor
Thank you so much Theodor for teaching us some valuable techniques on how to compare apples with apples. I am sure our readers will find these ideas very useful.
If you like this post, say thanks to Theodor.
Do you compare & analyze sales data?
I do this all the time. As part of running my small business, every couple of months, I would take up sales data and see if something odd is going on. I make line charts comparing sales of this year with previous year, understanding the overall trend and compare one product with another.
What about you? Do you analyze sales data? What techniques do you use use? Please share using comments.
Learn more from these pages:
If you work a lot with data & do similar work as above, go thru these articles to learn more.
37 Responses to “Quickly Change Formulas Using Find / Replace”
Chandoo,
this is a really cool stuff what I use quite often. In addtion this method also could be a good choice to switch the reference type of the formulas from relative to absolute or vice versa. (just simply replace the $ in the same way).
Andras
@Andras: you are right, we can use find / replace to change references, reference types etc. Now, only if they had regex in find/ replace, we could so much more 🙂
@Tony Rose: Thank you. This is very useful and powerful feature. I even use it for cleaning up data. While formulas are good, they are not the solution for every problem. Often when I need more powerful cleanup / changing, I copy paste the stuff to text editors like notepad++ and then use their find/replace to do the dirty task.
What if i have to change the formula from ='Analysis'!C1 to 'Analysis 1'!C1?
I tried doing it using Find /Replace but could't. Encountered some errors.
And is there a way to change this using VBA???
Hi,
Did you ever get a reply to this?
Thanks
Ollie
to make your life easier, suggest you to avoid (Space) in worksheet names whenever possible. Consider (underscore) instead.
As the first formula wouldn't have the single apostrophes (since there's no space) need to include that in replace. So, search for:
Analysis
and replace with:
'Analysis 1'
This could be the most useful tips I've seen in a while. I use this all the time and can instantly change 400 formulas with a few clicks. Like so many other functions in Excel, I don't know what I would do without this one.
Keep 'em coming!
[...] on formulas: 5 areas where mouse kicks keyboard’s butt | Edit formulas in bulk using Find / Replace | Excel Formulas Online [...]
THANKS BRO
You, sir, are a god among men...
This is really cool. Your just save me hours of work. Thanks.
Thanks so much for this fix! It saved me tons of work. I'm muddling my way through and this really helped!
Oh... My... God!
This tip just saved me about 2 hours every month! I can't believe how easy it is to use. Now, can somebody tell me who I should call to get a refund for the previous 100 hours I spent manually changing formulas cell by cell?
Thanks so much!
THANK YOU!!!
THANK YOU!!!!
You saved me hours, I had a sheet that has more than 500 formulas, and i needed to replace the year in all of them, you saved me hours
Awesome info on replacing cell addresses in formulas. I have never heard about Ctrl+` before. Thank you!
I have something inside a formula like:
=sum(A1, A2*10) all over I now need to get rid of the *10 {=sume(A1, A2)} I thought to use the find replace trick above but with a blank in the replace but it then outputs just zeros. I thought I could trick it by doing *1 but then it just turns into =*1) with none of my references. Does anyone have an idea how to do this?
The Ctrl+ trick is cool.
@T
Instead of replacing with a blank try replacing
*10)
with
)
Thank you! This literally will save me hours and hours of time, and that's without losing my sanity in the process!
I have Sheet(1), Sheet(2), Sheet(3), etc ... Sheet(100).
Then there's a summary tab where I want to recap information on all those different sheets. Is there anyway to create a formula on the Summary tab to get ='Sheet(1)'!B$29 copied down for all 100 sheets without having to change each sheet # within the formula by hand?
@Brigitte
If you have a list of the sheet names in A2:A100
In B2: =INDIRECT("'"&A2&"'!$B$29")
Copy down
or if you don't have a list of the sheets names you can make it up on the fly
=INDIRECT("'sheet("&ROW()-1&")'!$B$29")
Copy down
Thanks for the suggestion. However, I copied your formula right back to my file and it didn't work. So I did it another way. I put the tab/cell reference in one cell and then did an =INDIRECT() to capture that information.
K2="'Sheet("&L2&")'!B$29" which has a value of 'Sheet(1)'!B$29
B2=INDIRECT(K2) which now has a value of 40 (contents on Sheet(1).
Thank you!!!!
Thank you ..
Hi, Out of all the formulae, I wish to replace the formula which has generated 0 value with blank space? I am unable to do it with find and replace function,
Please suggest.
Thanks.
Chandoo, you literally just saved me about 2 hours of work. I had a document with a daily report in two formats. The second formate just linked to all the appropriate cells in the other format (different sheets). This was 180 references that needed to be changed and I had to make this for a 4 week period (aka 28 different sheets at 180 references to change per sheet).
Thanks so much.
I have tried this way and without using the Ctrl-` formula view
Either way, I am trying to do something simple, but it won't let me.
I have a bunch of cells with a simple math formula like
=-(0.5*20)
various values in each cell, multiplied by 20
I simply want to change the multiplier globally from 20 to 25. But when I tell it to find *20 and replace it with *25, it replaces the entire cell contents with *25, rather than just replacing the *20 portion of the cell contents.
Can anyone assist with this? Seems so simple, but Excel isn't letting me do it.
Search/Replace 20 or 20) with a cell Reference eg A1 or A1)
Then put the value 25 in A1
By using a * in the search it replaces all the text
how to find a specific cell's value in a column & replace replace it with another cell value i actually need a method to replace a data in ca column and replace with the value i have in a specific cell can i give a [ location ] of data to what i need to find and then give row or column range to where i need to find and the given value & then give a [ location ] of data to what i want to be replace with the find and replace by row & column range & than by specific criteria and than by specific location.
please help.
how to find a specific cell’s value in a column & replace replace it with another cell's value.
i actually need a method to find a specific cell's data in a column and replace it with the value i have in a specific cell.
can i give a [ location ] of data to what i need to find and then give row or column range from where i need to find the given value & then give a [ location ] of data to what i want to be replace with.
find and replace by row & column range & than by specific criteria and than by specific location.
please help.
how to find a specific cell’s value in a column & replace it with another cell’s value.
i actually need a method to find a specific cell’s data in a column and replace it with the value i have in a specific cell.
can i give a [ location ] of data to what i need to find and then give row or column range from where i need to find the given value & then give a [ location ] of data to what i want to be replace with.
"find and replace by row & column range & than by specific criteria and than by specific location."
in more than 100 sheets in entire workbook
please help.
This is a great tool, does anyone knows an easiest way??
I'm working with a system that has over 59000 references... so every time the replace all is activated. I lose an entire day.
i actually needs to find cell number "D12" in column "D" and replace with Cell Number "B8" for example
find what = Cell Number "D12" John McNamara
find Where = in Column "D"
Replace with = Cell Number "B8" Bieber D'Souza
Replace Range = Column "D"
In which Sheet = All Sheets in Work Book (more than 100 Sheets)
Note: in every Sheet Cells Number "D12" & "B8" containing Different Employ Name but the find rang and replace rang are same in every sheet and find what cell number and replace with cell number are same also.
please help!
thank you. saved lot of time.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart!
Hi, I am trying to figure out how to use RE to find and replace several values in a column. Using find and replace does not work because of the values I am working with. I have a column with hundreds of rows that have a description of several operating systems and other info, which looks like this: Windows Server 2008 R2 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide; Windows 2008 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide; Solaris 10 10 SPARC SECURITY TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE; and Windows Windows 2003 Member Server Security Technical Implementation Guide.
I need to be able to find and replace (or basically curtail the descriptions) to be Windows 2008 R2; Windows 2008; Windows 2003; and Solaris 10. BUT when I run find and replace with just *2008*, it finds every instance, including the ones with R2 at the end. I need it to only change the ones with 2008 to Windows 2008 and the ones that have 2008 R2 to Windows 2008 R2. I know it is possible, but I have no clue on how to write a macro to do this.
Thanks for your help,
Gerard
Wickedly efficient workaround. Excel really is a powerhouse program, all you have to do is dig into it. Ctl ~ exposes the formulas, and Ctl H allows for the multi edit. Brilliant, Chandoo!