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 “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.