2012 has been the most awesome year since we started Chandoo.org.
The credit for this goes to our community of Excel users – that is you.
For practically every day of 2012, you have inspired me (and all of us at Chandoo.org) to learn something new, share and make you awesome. I know I say this many times, but I can never feel enough – Thank you for your support to Chandoo.org.
Apart from you, there are many other amazing people & companies that played a role in our success. In this post, let me highlight them & express my sincere gratitude.
People who helped me in 2012:
Teachers & Gurus:
Running a business, website & family requires a lot of motivation, fresh ideas & learning. Thanks to several wonderful teachers & inspiring individuals who gave me the strength I need this year.
Excel & Visualization Teachers:
Jon Peltier, Dick Kusleika, Debra Dalgleish, Mike Alexandar, Daniel Ferry, Robert Mundigl, Hui, Francis, Rob Collie, Bill Jelen and many more.
Chandoo.org Forum Members:
Hui, Sajan, NarayanK, BobHC, Faseeh, SirJB, Luke and all other regulars & Ninjas who contribute to my Excel knowledge everyday.
Business & Motivation
Andy Sernovitz, Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, Avinash, Brandon Pearce, Alok, Pat, Chris, MrMoneyMustache, Jacob, Patrick and many more.
Technology
Amit Agarwal, John Gruber and many more sourced thru FlipBoard, Twitter & Pulse
Authors
As I was traveling quite a bit (1.5 months each in Thailand & Australia and few weeks with in India) I could not read as much as I wanted to. But I did manage to read & learn from some amazing authors, books. Special thanks to these wonderful authors.
- Chris Guillebeau $100 Startup
- Sam Walton Made in America
- Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast & Slow
- Benjamin Graham Intelligent Investor
- Bill Bryson Down Under
- John F. Love McDonalds – Behind the arches
- Danielle S. Fairhurst Business Analysis using Excel
- Rob Collie DAX Formulas for PowerPivot
- Bill Jelen PowerPivot in Excel
And many other…
Note: All the book links to Amazon are affiliate links. That means, if you purchase something after clicking on them, I get a few cents 
Partners, Affiliates & Supporters
To make Chandoo.org successful, I collaborate with many great minds in this industry. Some of these remarkable people are,
Chandoo.org Partners
- Danielle at Plum Solutions (and her assistant Susan) helped me arrange first ever Excel & Dashboard classes in Australia.
- Paramdeep at Pristine Education (and their staff) helped us offer various financial modeling training programs thru Chandoo.org.
- Daniel Ferry at ExcelHero.com helped me offer Excel School training along with his academy so that many of you could become awesome in Excel.
- Ankush at ActiKnow Consulting for helping many of our clients with custom Excel solutions.
Our Affiliates:
This year was great for many of our affiliates too. Thanks to their support, we had more customers and they had more revenues. Some of our most prominent affiliates are,
Dashboard Spy, Francis, Daniel Ferry, Debra Dalgleish, Philip, Ken Puls, Oscar, Jimmy Pena, Victor Chan, Alan Murray and many more.
Our Supporters:
Many people selflessly spend their time & energy promoting our cause – to make you awesome. My sincere thanks and love goes to,
Hui, SirJB, BobHC, Luke, Faseeh, Sajan, Narayank and all our Forum regular members & Ninjas.
Special thanks to Fabrice, Robert, Oscar & others who regularly to link to us and spread the good word.
Press:
Special thanks to Kumara Swamy from Telegraph India for featuring me in an article this year.
Customers & Readers
This year, close to 5,000 of you blessed me with your product purchases from us. More than 55,000 of you are now part of our RSS / Newsletter community. Many more continue to join us each day. Thank you so much for inviting me in to your life & taking time to learn from us.
Many thanks to KPMG, Renault Nissan, Ecobank, SEEK, and many other corporate clients for supporting us this year.
I am also thankful to our Excel forum members.
Special thanks to
- Attendees of various live classes conducted by me this year in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane & Chennai.
- People in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane & Perth who met me when I was in Australia.
- People in Chennai who met me for coffee.
- Hui & Family, Danielle & Family for sharing some of my evenings very nice and memorable.
Our Staff
Most of what we did at Chandoo.org not even remotely possible without of staff. I am amazed at their level of commitment and support to our mission to make you awesome. My heartfelt thanks to,
- Ravindra: for helping with various training enrollments, emails & customer service
- Vijay: for teaching VBA
- Sameer: for answering student doubts in training programs
- Sujatha: for providing customer care & email support
- Pothi: for taking care of our server & site infrastructure
- Chittibadrayya: for taking care of all the book-keeping & accounting aspect of our business
Special thanks to Neel (our iPhone developer) too.
Websites & Companies that helped me in 2012
I am thankful to Microsoft for making Excel so awesome.
I am also thankful to,
Email & Productivity: Google, iPhone
Website, Hosting & E-commerce: WordPress, GoDaddy, Wishlist Member, KnownHost, Amazon, PayPal, E-Junkie, 2Checkout, EBS
Community & Connection: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Skydrive
Software: Paint.NET, Mozy, Notepad ++, Camtasia & Snagit, Skype
There are many other software, companies and websites that help me every day. I am really thankful to each and every one of these. Detailed listing here.
Last but not least…
There is someone else that deserve utmost thanks for everything I do at Chandoo.org.
- My family: Jo & kids support me and Chandoo.org in numerous ways. They shower me with love, humor and support everyday so that I can be awesome at what I do.
- All my close friends & relatives: for supporting me & encouraging me to do better.
PS… something for you:
Here is a nice little surprise for you. Go ahead and download it. Unlock the secret message.
PS: Incase you have difficulty downloading the file, see it in action here.
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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