The other day, while I was putting my kids to sleep, this idea came to me. How do I check if a cell contains a palindrome, using Excel formulas?
Next morning, I wrestled with excel for about 20 minutes and boom, the formula is ready.
Here is how it works:
If you enter a word or phrase in column B, it would tell you whether it is a palindrome or not.
But what is a palindrome?
A palindrome is a word, phrase, verse, or sentence that reads the same backward or forward. For example: A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
[definition from palindromelist.net]
So, to check if a cell contains palindrome, we need to reverse the cell contents and see if both original and reverse are the same.
For example if B1 contains MAN, then the reverse would be NAM and hence MAN is not a palindrome.
But how do we write a formula to check if a cell has palindrome?
- Assuming B1 contains the word (or phrase), the first step is to clean it. That means, we need to remove any spaces, commas, exclamation marks & other punctuation symbols. So a phrase like “Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic.” would become “CigarTossitinacanItissotragic”.
- The next step is to match this cleaned text (lets say this will be C1) with the reverse of it.
- But there is no reverse formula. So we use MID() to extract one letter at a time and match it with the corresponding letter from end. (ie first letter with last letter, second letter with second last letter etc.)
- To do this, we use,
MID(C1,ROW(OFFSET($A$1,,,LEN(C1))),1=MID(C1,LEN(C1)-ROW(OFFSET($A$1,,,LEN(C1)))+1,1) - The left portion of this formula would give individual letters in C1 in left to right order and the right portion would give same in reverse order.
- We wrap this in a lovely SUMPRODUCT formula so that we can check for palindrome-ness of B1 using
=IF( SUMPRODUCT( ( MID(C1,ROW(OFFSET($A$1,,,LEN(C1))),1) = MID(C1,LEN(C1)-ROW(OFFSET($A$1,,,LEN(C1)))+1,1)) + 0 ) = LEN(C1), "It’s a Palindrome", "Nah!")
How does this formula work?
Well, that is your weekend homework. Go figure.
One more homework if you are game
If you feel like playing with words, here is another challenge.
How would you test if a cell contains alliteration?
(Alliteration here is defined as sentence where all words begin with same letter)
Go ahead and post your answers using comments.
Download Palindrome Test Excel Workbook
Click here to download the excel workbook and see the palindrome test formulas yourself.
Learn more about Excel Array Formulas
Array formulas are a special class of Excel formulas that can provide powerful results with little work. We have a huge collection of array formula examples on chandoo.org. Go thru below list and see how deep the rabit hole goes.
SUMPRODUCT Formula and how to use it
Advanced SUMPRODUCT Queries
Use Array Formulas to check if a list is sorted
Calculating sum of digits in a number using formulas
Check if a number is Prime using array formulas
More… Excel Array Formulas – Examples & Demos
PS: Monday is our (Indian) Independence Day. So I will see you again on Tuesday.
PPS: On Tuesday, we will be announcing our Excel Formula Crash Course. Get ready.
17 Responses to “Budget vs. Actual Profit Loss Report using Pivot Tables”
Good Work, Yogesh & Chandoo! Thanks.
Hi everybody,
first sorry I am late to say something about this topic;actually I was waiting last part
second I am not accountant I am an Engineer
third """"Very Important""" the idea is not about Loss but I am sure it is profit
Based on third it shows:
1- How to use EXCEL
2- How to use pivot TABLES
3- How to collect and arrange DATA
4- How to make reports
Many Thanks
Hi Yogesh and Chandoo,
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
You guys are great!
thanks chandoo and yogesh, thanks for you lessons, are great!....i have a idea for a budget. I try to do it..... thanks for all
Thanks a lot for sharing the most powerful tool worldwide "knowledge"
Warm greetings from Peru
Hi -
This is a really great article because it's a simple and common thing you'd want to do with a pivot table but not at all obvious how to do it! So - muchas gracias to Chandoo and Yogesh!
One thing - I couldn't get past the group error in the sample file. I would click on ungroup but it didn't seem to have any effect. I'd appreciate it if anybody has any pointers here.
-Juanito
Hi Chandoo
I am also having the group error. Can't seem to ungroup? Appreciate if you explain further on the steps required in order to get to calculated items.
Many thanks and keep up the great work.
Cheers
Adam
Hi Chandoo,
I'm struggling resolving the problem depicted below:
I have a set of data, with (among others) a "Region" field (can be APJ, EMEA, or AMS), and a "Country" field.
Unfortunately, I need to group data by the following 4 Regions: APeJ, Japan, EMEA and AMS.
I first tried to make a pivot with Region and Country in the rows (or columns), and then group Country data as per the above.
Alas, as soon as I have a new Country that appear in my data set, my groupings are broken, and I have to redo the job of ungrouping, grouping etc.
I thought I could try to use calculated item, by adding first a new column to my dataset concatenating Region_Country, and create an "APeJ" calculated item that would sum all the "APJ_*" and substract the "APJ_Japan", but again, no clue, as I can't find a way to use any wild card in those formulas.
Given that I already found extremely helpful tips and tricks in your site that helped me manage that bunch of data, I'm pretty sure you'll have a bright idea on how I can solve that one!
Thanks in advance for your lights!
Hi Catherine...
In such cases, I advice using an additional column in the data itself. You can set-up a grouping table else where with country in first column, region in second column. And then in the data, you can add an extra column and use VLOOKUP to fetch the region based on the country.
Then feed this entire data (with extra column) to pivot table and use the extra column to group the data.
Hi Chandoo,
Thank you for your prompt answer.
I finally came to the same conclusion - after a rest 🙂 . I was probably too tired Friday evening (it was rather late), having spent hours in manipulating all my surveys data so as to pull rolling averages, make nice graphs and so on, and was trying to find a complex solution when there was a simple one.
Thanks again,
Catherine
Hey,
Great post!
I for example have different database structure with the following fields :
Date, Expense, Income, Sum (Income - Expense), Category (Sales, Cost of Goods and etc).
Creating a P&L report for the whole year works great. Including gross margin % and etc.
Though, creating P&L report by QTR/Month is becoming impossible since i get the following error : “This PivotTable report field is grouped. You cannot add calculated item to grouped filed.”
Is there a solution for this kind of problem?
Like Adam and Juanito, I also cannot ungroup.
Would appreciate it if you can add a few more lines and a screenshot or two on where to put the mouse cursor to ungroup.
Hi, I have figured out the ungrouping problem. One of the earlier steps was to group by month, if you pull the month back down to the column then right click and then select ungroup, then pull the month back up so you end up with just data source and budget/actual as the headings, then you can continue on.
To solve the ungroup problem, my method is:
Copy the "data" sheet to a whole new Excel workbook
and directly work on Part 6.
And since it is a fresh copy, Excel don't show me the "can't ungroup" problem. Hope this help.
Thank you Yogesh for this wonderful tutorial.
Kent, Malaysia
Just when i thought pivots were awesome i learn about inserting the calculated fields and that makes them more awesome. chandoo where have you been all my life.
Hello - your P&L pivot version has really impressed my boss and would like to use it. I have applied it for a actual vs budget vs forecast model I have created. One problem. In your variance above the operating profit percent % variance shows 33.8% but I want it to show (0.01) point or the true diff from prior budget.
I know I can add calculation to the side but boss would like to see it in pivot table.
Please help
Thanks
I have a further query which may solve my above dilemma. Is it possible to add a column that calculates percent increase. So in the example above a new column would be added to show variance %.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks