Often we deal with data where numbers are buried inside text and we need to extract them. Today morning I had such task. As you know, we recently ran a survey asking how much salary you make. We had 1800 responses to it so far. I took the data to Excel to analyze it. And surprise! the numbers are a mess. Here is a sample of the data.
Now, how do I extract the salary amounts from this without typing the values?
My first thought is to write a user defined function to extract the number from text. But I usually shy away from VBA. So I wanted to see if there is a formula based approach to extract the number from text.
Using formulas to extract number from text
To extract number from a text, we need to know 2 things:
- Starting position of the number in text
- Length of the number
For example, in text US $ 31330.00 the number starts at 6th letter and has a length of 8.
So, if we can write formulas to get 1 & 2, then we can combine them in MID formula to extract the number from text!
Finding the starting position of number in text
To find the starting position, we need to find the first character which is a number (0 to 9). In other words, if we can find the positions of 0 to 9 inside the given text, then the minimum of all such positions would be starting position.
Sounds complicated?!? Well, in that case look at the formula and then you will understand why this works.
Assuming the text is in A1 and the range lstNumbers contains 0 to 9, below formula finds starting position
{=MIN(IFERROR(FIND(lstNumbers,A1),””))}
You need to array enter it (CTRL+SHIFT+Enter)
How this formula works?
FIND(lstNumbers, A1) portion: This part finds where each of the numbers 0 to 9 occur in the text in A1. If a match is found, the position is returned. Else we get an error. For US $ 31330.00 the values would be,
{10;7;#VALUE!;6;#VALUE!;#VALUE!;#VALUE!;#VALUE!;#VALUE!;#VALUE!}
Meaning, 0 occurs at 10th position, 1 occurs at 7th position, 3 occurs at 6th position and everything else (2,4,5,6,7,8,9) do not occur in the number.
IFERROR(…,””) portion: Then, we replace errors with empty spaces so that MIN could work its magic.
At this stage, the result would be, {10;7;””;6;””;””;””;””;””;””}
Related: IFERROR Formula – syntax & examples
{=MIN(…)} portion: This would find the minimum of {10;7;””;6;””;””;””;””;””;””} which is 6. The starting position of number inside text.
Because we are finding multiple items, we need to array enter the formula to get correct result.
Finding the length of number
Once we find starting point, next we need to know the length of the number. There are many ways to do this. Depending on the variety in your input data, you can choose a technique that works best.
Approach 1 – counting number of digits in text
My first approach is to count number of digits in the text and use it as length. For this, we can break the text in to individual characters and then see if each of them is a number or not.
Assuming the text is in A1, the number of digits in it are,
=SUMPRODUCT(- -ISNUMBER(MID(A1,ROW($A$1:$A$200),1)+0))
MID(A1,ROW($A$1:$A$200),1) + 0 portion: This breaks the text in A1 in to individual characters (assumes the max length is 200) and then adds 0 to them.
At this stage, you have 200 values some of them numbers, others errors.
ISNUMBER(…) portion: This checks all the 200 values for numbers. After this, we will have 200 true or false values.
— ISNUMBER (…) portion: This converts the true, false values to 0s and 1s. (by double negating Excel will convert boolean values to number equivalents).
SUMPRODUCT(…) portion: This finally sums up all 1s thus giving us the number of digits in the text.
Does it work?
While this approach works well for some numbers, it fails in other cases. For example, a text like US $ 31330.00 has number portion with 8 characters (31330.00) where as our formula would say the length is 7 (because decimal point . is not a number and hence ISNUMBER() would give false for that).
So I had to move on to next approach.
Approach 2 – counting number of digits, commas & decimal points in text
The next approach is to count not only numbers, but also commas & decimal points in the text. For this, first I placed all the digits (0 to 9) and comma & decimal point in a range called as lstDigits.
Below formula counts how many of lstDigits are in text in A1.
=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIF(lstDigits,MID(A1,ROW($A$1:$A$200),1)))
COUNTIF(lstDigits, MID(…)) portion: This checks how many times each of the 200 characters appear in lstDigits.
This would be an array of counts. For example {0;0;0;0;0;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;1;…} for US $ 31330.00, indicating that first 5 are not in lstDigits and then we have 8 in lstDigits.
SUMPRODUCT(…) portion: just sums all the numbers, hence we get length as 8.
Related: SUMPRODUCT Formula – examples & explanation
Extracting numbers from text
Once we have starting position of number & its length, we can combine them in a MID formula to extract the number. Here is the result for our sample data set.
As you can see, this method works well, but fails in some cases like,
- European number formats (, for decimal point and . for thousands)
- Text with multiple numbers
Fortunately, in my data set, we had only a few incidents like these. So I have decided to manually adjust them than work out even more complicated formula.
Using Macros to extract numbers from text
As you can guess, we can use a simple macro (or UDF) to extract numbers from a given text. We will learn how to do this next week.
Download Example Workbook
Click here to download example workbook with all these formulas. Examine the formulas to understand how you can extract numbers from text in Excel.
How do you Extract numbers from Text?
Often I deal with data like this. I use a mix of techniques. Apart from the one mentioned above I also use,
- getNumber() UDF to extract numbers from text (more on this next week)
- Use SUBSTITUTE to clear formatting (replace dots with empty spaces and commas with dots to convert from European format to standard format)
- Use VALUE to extract the number (works when number is shown as text)
- Use +0 to force convert numbers from text (works when number is shown as text)
What about you? How do you extract numbers from text? What are your favorite techniques? Please share using comments.
Tips on cleaning data using Excel
If you use Excel to clean data, go thru these articles to learn some powerful techniques.
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.