So who is up for an Excel challenge?
Shelly, who is an HR Manager sent this distress call last week,
First off, I LOVE your site. It is the first place I go for any excel question and I love the daily emails. I’m not sure if you answer direct emails, but I’m begging you to at least read this and let me know if I’m crazy or not (good thing you don’t know me personally :>). I’ve searched through you ‘ask an excel’ blog and I have not come close to anything I’m trying to accomplish. I’ll do my best to explain it.
I have a group of employees- lets say 100 employees.
Each employee has a performance rating attached to them.
I want to divide the group by 5%, 15%, 65%, 10%, 5% based on their performance rating.So for example how I manually do this is by running the report of employees.
I then sort the list by Performance ratings from High to Low (0.0-5.0 is our range and you can have decimals in between 0.1, 2.5, 2.3 etc.)
I then take the total number of employees and calculate the top 5%, next the 15%, then 65%, then 10%, 5% (so breaking them up into groups).
Doing this isn’t horrible, but I have to do this for each department and we are talking 700 departments. Each department is not alike- so some may have 50 employees while others may have 200+.
Is there an easier way to do this in excel??
Anytime an email starts with I Love, I am all ears. So naturally I read the entire mail. And I had to sympathize with her. 700 DEPARTMENTS?!? Can you imagine dealing with 700 departments with lots of disgruntled employees. I remember my performance evaluation & rating days back when I had a full time job. Almost everyone I knew hated their bosses during the appraisal season. And when hikes are announced, everyone (including the person with fabulous hike) would call their favorite head hunter and flirt. Aah, good old days of ratings & reviews.
But I digress.
So going back to our HR manager in distress, how would you help her?
Your challenge – highlight employees by performance rating
Here is your challenge.
- Download this file.
- It contains data & coloring rules.
- Set up conditional formatting such that you can highlight the data based on the rules
- Bonus points if you can set up conditional formatting rules such that they work on any sheet (assuming each department has their own sheet of data in same format)
- Share your rules & solution with us in comments
- Feel jolly good knowing that you are awesome in Excel.
Need some help? Check out these articles
Conditional formatting is one of my favorite features in Excel. Naturally, I want you to be awesome in it. Check out these tutorials & examples to understand how to solve this problem.
- What is conditional formatting & how to use it?
- Using formulas with conditional formatting
- Highlight top 10 performances with conditional formatting
- More on conditional formatting [more than 60 examples]
Download my solution
Now, some of you might be in same boat as Shelly. Please note that I sympathize with anyone who deals with people from 700 departments or more. But sympathy seldom solves struggle. So, go ahead and download my solution. Break it apart, examine the conditional formatting rules and fire the bottom 5% of your employees. Well, go easy on the last part 😛
Click here to download my solution.
Go ahead and share your solution
So what are you waiting for. Put on your Excel hats and get thinking. Once you have an answer, rush back to us & post it in comments. Go!
Need more challenges? Try these too
If you want more Excel challenges & homework, check out these.
23 Responses to “Learn Top 10 Excel Features”
What it looks like if excel without formula?? 🙂
It would be not excel it would just be fancy tables in which you could just use power point. (Chandoo) would Access be an alternative?
Awesome piece of work!!!
Great article.
Chandoo - my biggest interest in the article was the awesome word-graphic at the top - where did you go to get it done into a shape?
@Rich.. thank you. I used http://www.tagxedo.com/ to generate this word cloud. I took all the comments in the original post, pasted them in tagxedo website and set up the shape etc.
Awesome Chandoo.. You need always needs coffee to start up with. BTW , how did u created the Heart Shaped picture filled with High Repetitive text in it .. Please put it on your Next blog ...
Chandoo, good article. I’ve added a link to it from Connexion – our collection of the most useful and interesting spreadsheet-related articles from the web. See http://www.i-nth.com/resources/connexion
Hi,
Just one small question. Where the hell have been I in the past for not discovering this website sooner?
I've lost a job interview recently where even though I had the subject knowledge, I was not upto their mark in Excel.
Thank you for all the free tips, guidance and for creating this forum environment.
[PS: I've just been through the site for the 1st time, and have signed up for the newsletter. You can expect pretty stupid questions from me soon]
Hy Chandoo, you always inspire me with to explore something new in excel. This data structure table is only for excel 2007 or compatible to 2010. I recently installed latest excel version 2013 in my System and experience problems regarding operating according to previous one. I'm waiting your article relates to that excel version.
Thanks
Awesome article Mr. Chandoo and that is a awesome heart shaped pic you created. Great tips as well.
[...] Learn Top 10 Excel Features | Chandoo.org – Learn Microsoft Excel Online. [...]
Chandoo is awesome..
Thanks, i got better, And i always get 90.50 in my grade card but now i get 96.50 i improved because of the tutorials you gave, Thank You Very Much Chandoo Guy.
Hi chandoo, i am intersted in seeing the video or step by step done procedure of analysing the comments and presenting in the data percentage steps. I think this one would be first step in finding out how generally happens data calculation. Thank you.
As well i would like to know how to get that black shape art of your face which i see in chandoo. I am interested in making it for me.
Nice to see the features considered by Excel users to be most useful. It might be a good idea to also analyze StackOverflow Excel questions to see what keywords appear most often.
Here are my top 10 Excel Features (for advanced users):
http://www.analystcave.com/excel-10-top-excel-features/
Thanks a ton for this it totally helped with my homework ????
Very good effort
Thank you for this. Lots of learning in the links you've provided for this septuagenarian.
Pls send me new post
Dude, your humor ? ?
Loved your work.
Hello Sir,
I am Sanjeev Khakre and i from Indore City, India , I am your big follower and i have watch your videos and learnt a lots of excel trick or function and many more . thanks so much for all of your excellent support.
Your excel knowledge is real awesome.
Thanks
Sanjeev
Your work is excellent but pls willing to know more details about the features of microsoft excel
Chandoo Would Access be a better alternative than VB?