This post is authored by Martin, one of our readers.
Situation:
Sometimes I encounter data in my tables with blank cells where there is a repeated value from the cell directly above. See below:
This can be annoying when it comes to interpreting the data and when sorting columns.
Solution:
Here’s the solution I use.
1. Select the whole table. I favor the shortcut Ctrl A to do this. Make sure you perform this shortcut from within the table though as otherwise the entire worksheet with be selected. This gives us Figure 2:
2. Next we will open the Go To dialog box. This is a very useful dialog for selecting certain types of cells, for example cells containing formulas, constant values, visible cells and so on. F5 or Ctrl G both work as keyboard shortcuts.
3. Click the Special button (see Figure 3)
4. In the next screen select Blanks.
5. Click OK and notice that all blank cells are now highlighted in the table (Figure 5). Notice too, the position of the active cell. This is the one un-shaded cell in this selection. In this example it is cell D3. If the table were fully complete this cell would show the same value as the cell above it – cell D2 – the word Office.
6. Next we will use the fact that cell references in Excel by default behave in a relative manner. That means when you copy a formula to another cell, the cell reference in the formula change relative to the location in the worksheet it has been moved to unless they have been made absolute.
7. Without clicking any of the cells in the data, simply enter the following simple formula:
=D2
If you are following along here with a different table, then you will substitute the cell reference of the cell directly above your active cell. (Figure 6)
8. Next the important part. We need to copy this simple formula to all the other blank cells which could number in the hundreds or thousands or greater still. How do we do it?
Simply by using one of the best keyboard shortcuts I know in Excel: Ctrl & Enter.
This shortcut when used in a single cell will enter the value inputted into the cell and keep that cell active, instead of performing a carriage return to the next row.
But, when used over a range of cells, Ctrl & Enter together will copy the value of the active cell into all cells in the selection.
In this case, we are not going to copy the value of D2 into all blank cells, but the relative cell that appears over each blank cell. In cell D3’s case this was D2. In A3’s case for example it is A2 and so on.
After CTRL Entering the formula the worksheet now looks like:
9. There is one last important step. These pasted valued are, as we have seen, relative formulas. If I were to change the sort order in one of the columns, for example to identify which Cost in column E is the highest, my table would be completed distorted as the formulas in the changing rows are all retrieving the value in the cell above. See Figure 8.
I’ll Undo my flawed Sort by clicking Ctrl Z.
The final step therefore is to change these formulas into constants so that this type of problem can be avoided.
To do this, select the table, (or if the formula cells remain highlighted, you won’t need to select the table at all).
Now copy your selection with Ctrl C.
Next, perform a Paste Special / Values to replace the formulas with their constant equivalents – Figure 9.
And that’s it!
Thank you Martin
Many thanks to Martin for sharing this simple yet very beautiful trick with all of us. If you enjoyed this article, say thanks to Martin.
How do you deal with Blank Cells
Barking dogs, bad bosses and blank cells are everywhere. I am eager to know how you deal with them. Please share your tips & techniques with us using comments.
More on Blank Cells and other Unclean Data
If you constantly deal with blank cells or other types of unclean data, read these articles to learn few more tricks.
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.