Few weeks ago, someone asked me “What are the top 10 formulas?” That got me thinking.
While each of us have our own list of favorite, most frequently used formulas, there is no standard list of top 10 formulas for everyone. So, today let me attempt that.
If you want to become a data or business analyst then you must develop good understanding of Excel formulas & become fluent in them.
A good analyst should be familiar with below 10 formulas to begin with.
1. SUMIFS Formula
If you listen very carefully, you can hear thousands of managers around the world screaming… “How many x we did in region A, product B, customer type C in month M?” right now.
To answer this question without the song and dance of excessive filtering & selecting, you must learn SUMIFS formula.
This magical formula can sum up a set of values that meet several conditions.
The syntax of SUMIFS is like this:
=SUMIFS( what you want to sumup, condition column 1, condition, condition column 2, condition….)
Example:
=SUMIFS(sales, regions, “A”, products, “B”, customer types, “C”, month, “M”)
Learn more about SUMIFS formula.
10 Advanced SUMIFS examples (video)
2. X/VLOOKUP Formula
Pop quiz time ….
Which of the below things would bring world to a grinding halt?
A. Stop digging earth for more oil
B. Let US jump off the fiscal cliff or hit debt ceiling
C. Suddenly VLOOKUP (or XLOOKUP) formula stops working in all computers, world-wide, forever
If you answered A or B, then its high time you removed your head from sand and saw the world.
The answer is C (Well, if all coffee machines in the world unite & miraculously malfunction that would make a mayhem. But thankfully that option is not there)
XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP formula lets you search for a value in a table and return a corresponding value. For example you can ask What is the name of the customer with ID=C00023 or How much is the product price for product code =p0089 and VLOOKUP would give you the answers.
The syntax for VLOOKUP is simple.
=VLOOKUP(what you want to lookup, table, column from which you want the output, is your table sorted? )
Example:
=VLOOKUP(“C00023”, customers, 2, false)
Lookup customer ID C00023 in the first column of customers table and return the value from 2nd column. Assume that customers table is not sorted.
Learn more about the new & improved XLOOKUP formula.
Click here to learn more about VLOOKUP Formula.
Bonus: Comprehensive guide to lookup formulas.
3. Dynamic Array Functions
Excel 365 introduced a new class of functions called DYNAMIC ARRAY FUNCTIONS. These will let you filter, sort, extract distinct values from your data with ease. It also added a special formula functionality called spill behavior. It means Excel formulas can now return multiple values as a result & spill them down as needed. See this quick GIF demo.
Learn more about the POWERFUL dynamic array functionality in Excel (video).
4. IF & IFS Formulas
Q: What do you call a business that does not make a single decision?
A: Government!
Jokes aside, every business needs to make decisions, even governments!!! So, how do we model these decisions in Excel.
Using IF formulas of course.
For example, lets say your company decides to give 10% pay hike to all people reading Chandoo.org & 5% hike to rest. Now, how would you express this in Excel?
Simple, we write =IF(employee reads Chandoo.org, “10% hike”, “5% hike”)
The syntax of IF formula is simple:
=IF (condition to test, output for TRUE, output for FALSE)
10 must know Advanced IF formulas.
5. Nesting Formulas
Unfortunately, businesses do not make simple decisions. They always complicate things. I mean, have you ever read income tax rules?!? Your head starts spinning by the time you reach 2nd paragraph.
To model such complex decisions & situations, you need to nest formulas.
Nesting refers to including one formula with in another formula.
An example situation: Give 12% hike to employees who read Chandoo.org at least 3 days a week, Give 10% hike to those who read Chandoo.org at least once a week, for the rest give 5% hike.
Excel Formula: =IF(number of times employee reads chandoo.org in a week >=3, “12% hike”, IF( number of times employee reads chandoo.org in a week >0, “10% hike”, “5% hike”))
You see what we did above? We used IF formula inside another IF formula. This is nothing but nesting.
You can nest any formula inside another formula almost any number of times.
Nesting formulas helps us express complex business logic & rules with ease. As an analyst, you must learn the art of nesting.
Lots of nested formula examples & explanations here.
6. Basic Arithmetic Expressions
=(((123+456)*(789+987)) > ((123-456)/(789-987)))^3 & " time I saw a tiger"
If you read the above expression and not had to scratch your head once, then you are on way to become an awesome analyst.
Most people jump in to Excel formulas without first learning various basic operators & expressions. Fortunately, learning these requires very little time. Most of us have gone thru basic arithmetic & expressions in school. Here is a summary if you were caught napping in Math 101.
| Operator | What it does | Example |
|---|---|---|
| + – * / | Basic arithmetic operators. Perform addition, subtraction, multiplication & division | 2+3, 7-2, 9*12, 108/3, 2+3*4-2 |
| ^ | Power of opetator. Raises something to the power of other value. | 2^3, 9^0.5, PI()^2, EXP(1)^0.5 |
| ( ) | To define precedence in calculations. Anything included in paranthesis is calcuated first. | (2+3)*(4+5) calcuates 2+3 first, then 4+5 and multiplies both results. |
| & | To combine 2 text values | “You are ” & “awesome” returns “You are awesome” |
| % | To divide with 100. | 2/4% will give 50 as result. Note: (2/4)% will give 0.5% as result. |
| : | Used to specify ranges | A1:B20 refers to the range from cell A1 to B20 |
| $ | To lock a reference column or row or both | $A$1 refers to cell A1 all the time. $A1 refers to column A, relative row based on where you use it. For more refer to absolute vs. relative references in Excel. |
| [ ] | Used to structurally refer to columns in table | ourSales[month] refers to the month column in the ourSales table. Works only in Excel 2007 or above. Know more about Excel Tables. |
| @ | Used to structurally refer to current row values in a table | ourSales[@month] refers to current row’s month value in oursales table. |
| # | Spill Operator (Excel 365) | Used to get spill range from a dynamic array formula |
| { } | To specify an inline array of values | {1,2,3,4,5} – refers to a the list of values 1,2,3,4,5 |
| < > <= >= | Comparison operators. Output will always be boolean – ie TRUE or FALSE. | 2>3 will be FALSE. 99<101 will be TRUE. |
| = <> | Equality operators. Check whether 2 values are equal or not equal. Output will TRUE or FALSE | 2=2, “hello”=”hello”, 4<>5 will all return TRUE. |
| * ? | Used as wild cards in certain formulas like COUNTIFS etc. | COUNTIFS(A1:A10, “a*”) counts the values in range A1:A10 starting with a. For more on this refer to COUNTIFS & SUMIFS in Excel |
| SPACE | Intersection operator. Returns the range at intersection of 2 ranges | A1:C4 B2:D5 refers to the intersection or range A1:C4 and B2:D5 and returns B2:C4. Caution: The output will be an array, so you must use it in another formula which takes arrays, like SUM, COUNT etc. |
7. Text formulas
While there are more than two dozen text formulas in Excel including the mysterious BHATTEXT (which is used to convert numbers to Thai Bhats, apparently designed by Excel team so that they could order Thai take out food #), you do not need to learn all of them. By learning few very useful TEXT formulas, you can save a ton of time when cleaning data or extracting portions from mountains of text.
As an aspiring analyst, at-least acquaint your self with below formulas:
- LEFT, RIGHT & MID – to extract portions of text from left, right & middle.
- TRIM – to remove un-necessary spaces from beginning, middle & end of a text.
- SUBSTITUTE – to replace portions of text with something else.
- LEN – to calculate the length of a text
- TEXT – to convert a value to TEXT formatting
- FIND – to find whether something is present in a text, if so at what position
Here are my top 6 TEXT formulas for data analysis.
8. NETWORKDAYS & WORKDAY Formulas
“There aren’t enough days in the weekend” – Somebody
Whether a weekend has enough days or not, as working analyst, you must cope with the working day calculations. For example, if a project takes 180 working days to complete and starts on 16th of January 2013, how would you find the end date?
Thankfully, we do not have to invent a formula for this. Excel has something exactly for this. WORKDAY formula takes a start date & working days and tells you what the end date would be.
Like wise NETWORKDAYS formula tells us how many working days are there between any 2 given dates.
Both these formulas accept a list of additional holidays to consider as well.
- NETWORKDAYS: calculate the number of working days between 2 dates (assuming Saturday, Sunday weekend)
- NETWORKDAYS.INTL: Same as NETWORKDAYS, but lets you use custom weekends [Excel 2010+ only]
- WORKDAY: Calculate the end date from a start date & number of working days
- WORKDAY.INTL: Same as WORKDAY, but lets you use custom weekends. [Excel 2010+ only]
More on working with Date & Time values in Excel.
9. SMALL & LARGE Formulas
Almost nobody asks about “Who was the second person to climb Mt. Everest, or walk on moon or finish 100 mtrs race the fastest?”.
And yet, all businesses ask questions like “Who is our 2nd most valuable customer?, third vendor from bottom on invoice delinquency? 4th famous coffee shop in Jamaica?”
So as analysts our job is to answer these questions with out wasting too much time. That is where SMALL, LARGE formulas come in handy.
- SMALL: Used to find nth smallest value from a list. Use it like =SMALL(range of values, n).
- LARGE: Used to find nth largest value from a list.
- MIN: Gives the minimum value of a list.
- MAX: Gives the maximum value of a list.
- RANK: Finds the rank of a value in a list. Use it like =RANK(value, in this list, order)
10. IFERROR Formula
Errors, lousy canteen food & dysfunctional coffee machines are eternal truths of corporate life. While you can always brown bag your lunch & bring a flask of finely brewed coffee to work, there is no escaping when your VLOOKUP #N/As. Or is there?
Well, you can always use the lovely IFERROR formula to handle errors in your formulas.
Syntax:
IFERROR(formula, what to do in case of error)
Use it like:
IFERROR(VLOOKUP(….), “Value not found!”)
Click here to learn more about IFERROR Formula.
3 Bonus Formulas
If you can master the above 10 formulas, you will be ahead of 80% of all Excel analysts. Here are 3 more important formulas that can come handy when doing some serious data analysis work.
- OFFSET formula: to generate dynamic ranges from a starting point and use them elsewhere (in charts, formulas etc.).
- SUMPRODUCT formula: Unleash the full power of Excel array processing by using SUMPRODUCT.
- SUBTOTAL formula: Calculate totals, counts & averages etc. on a range with filters.
Top 10 Excel Formulas – Video
If you like a video presentation of these formulas with some demos, check this out.
Sample file & more on the concepts shown in the video here.
What formulas do you think are important for analysts?
During my days as business analyst, not a single day went by without using Excel. It was an important tool in my journey to become an awesome analyst. I cannot stress the importance of formulas like SUMIFS, VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH enough. They play a vital role in analyzing data & presenting outputs.
What about you? What formulas do you think are important for analysts? Please share your ideas & tips using comments.
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49 Responses to “Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel!”
Excellent post again from awesome chandoo.org
This is one of the post to evident, without using macros we can create excellent charts using available excel options.
Slicer is one of the useful option in excel 2010 .. excited to see more options in excel 2013.
Regards,
Saran
http://www.lostinexcel.blogspot.com
Nice one chandoo............... great work done.....
Cool article. Only downside was that I didn't see at first that I needed 2010. Guess I still have to wait awhile before getting to try this out myself.
I consider myself an Excel expert, but you constantly amaze me with posts like this. Fantastic calendar!
Good post, like this little trick!!
How to not show the value in the cell
format the cell to custom with the below
;;;
Could you add lists of holidays to be transferred to the calendar days?
Two lists would be needed: 1) for the holidays that stay fixed (eg, CHristmas), and 2) for the holidays that move around (eg, Thanksgiving).
Such lists would be prepared externally, and the program would transfer their information to the appropriate days.
Wow! This is something amazing. I am going to do some practicals with this and show a sales trend on this. As we have our sales plans weekly basis, this should impress by boss when put in dashboard. Cool.
And thanks1
Chandoo you have a knack of getting on to these great looking very creative ideas!
One thing with calendars I have seen before is not catering for able to enter notes or appointments or project milestones. But with this one it's easy enough to add the extra lines as you have done for the chart concept and link to this other type of info.
For 2003 we could replace slicers with a validation style dropdown couldn't we?
Chandoo, you are awesome;) i was using calender to show my reports, but i had made all months and then underneith date shows the value, man its really awesome . i am going to use this format for my reports.. only draw back for me is i am using 2007. hence no slicer.. may be have to modify with out slicer.
Why not use =weeknum() for the weeknum column?
Great tricks! I love trying to reproduce the charts myself to get the hang of 'em. This one was great.
My only issue is getting the VBA in the year object to refresh the data. I used the VBA provided at the link, and, I can see it in the Macros tab, but, when I click the spinner the data does not update. Any tips?
Thx!
3G
^^Ignore this! NOT ENOUGH COFFEE YET.
I forgot about the "Assign Macro" option
:-s
Just started at chandoo - this is great!
I opted to use the formula =IF(F6>F5,G5,G5+1) for my weeknum - worked for me (I didn't get all the way through the example, since I'm running Excel 2007 - so don't know if that'll affect anything later in the example). I'm open to comments on this alternative approach.
Thanks for creating this website!
VC (Excel student).
Very cool - but now I'm even more excited for the new time controls for Excel 2013!
Great calendar...
I wonder whether we can make a school calendar (Class, subjects, teachers) using this calendar, assuming the weekly plan is duplicated across the year.
I would love to be a part of creating a class schedule...I'm attempting to help a friend (gratis) to do just that - can you point me in the right direction or provide a sample of sorts?
[...] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. [...]
Hello Chandoo,
Great works! I learn a lot from this website. Here is the problem I met when I follow your tutorial: once I run and save this cool pivot calendar chart , the size of excel file will increase every time. Could you let me know how to figure it out? Thank you for your time in advance.
An excel chart-fan from China.
I already figured it out.
wow, love the calendar, i'm a newbie, found this site and it's amazing.
Got it mostly figured out, but could do with help with your named range 'tblchosen'
I can build the pivots, link the calendars together but can't see how to use index(tblchosen...) to pull through the productivity figures
appreciate any help
thanks
Great. Miss the Today button. Will try and figure a way to add this to the file.
I want to start the week on Monday, not Sunday (MTWTFSS). Re-arranging the calendar tab works however, any month where the 1st is a Sunday starts on the second and totally omits Sun 1. I have been tinkerign for a while, but can't seem to figure this out.
Changing F2 on the 'Calcs' tab to 2 so that the week starts on Monday works.
Cutting & pasting Sunday on the 'Pivot Calendar' tab and moving all cells up 1 row works.
However, using April 2013 for example, you lose the 1st off of the pivot calendar so that the month starts on 2 April. What should happen is the first row should only show Sun 1 April and then the next row starts Mon 2 April. Still can't fugure out where the problem lies.
"Further Enhancements:
Adjust week start to Monday: Likewise, you can modify your formulas to adjust weekstart to Monday or any other day you fancy."
I have tinkered with this previously with no success, does anyone know which formulas require tinkering, I have only succeeded in breaking this in an effort start a week on a Monday.
[...] Interactivo Artículo original var dd_offset_from_content = 50; var dd_top_offset_from_content = 0; Tags: 2013, calendario, [...]
Completely off topic, but how do you create those animated pictures in your tutorials? It is not a movie (like the Youtube movie), so what software do you use to create such high quality "animated" pictires? Thanks
Jeroen
the animated pics are called Animated Gifs
they are made using Camtasia
Refer: http://chandoo.org/wp/about/what-we-use/
This is fairly easy to do just using calendar formulas, which would be quicker, and doesn't need VBA? Am I missing something?
[...] on how to generate an interactive calendar using pivot tables. Please check out Chandoo’s Interactive Pivot Table Calendar & Chart in Excel before reading this, as I want to go through how I used his method to adapt a calendar which was [...]
Great tip shared by you... howevr would appreciate if you could mention in your tricks about excel version. The example above would work only in excel 2010 and above I believe. Please help me if there is any way we can use the tip in excel 2007 as well..
Many Thanks,
Regards,
FK
Hi, I'm going to give this a shot, but one small question before I do. Can a linked cell be updated based on the date that is selected from the calendar? The calendar is really cool and this would make is especially good to use (and easy and fast).
Regards,
swissfish.
This post is awesome, and using your instructions, I was able to get this to work with a pivot table that pulls directly from a Project Server database. It was a bit complicated to get the day to sum correctly, but I managed to finagle it. I hope you don't mind if I link back to you when I post my instructions.
Thanks for giving me a starting point for this!
[...] http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/09/12/interactive-pivot-calendar/ [...]
This is great, and pretty much everything I was looking for.
However, I already have a large spreadsheet, and I want to include your worksheets in it. I copied all the worksheets and the Module 1, but I can't get it to work. What else do I need to transfer / update please?
Hello there, is it possible to use this pivot to produce a calendar style chart, with returns multiple data per date, which on the calendar then, when clicked links to the data to provide more background information? What do you think? I'd love if I could pivot when i need. thanks, m
Hi, did you ever figure out how to do this? I would love to find a way...
This is amazing and will work well for my calendar project! My question is, how can I expand the calendar to fit a standard sheet of paper?
Wow - this is so creative. I'm taking the basic idea and building a reservation calendar.
Question: How do you get the month and year slicers on a different page than the pivot tables? I'd like to have my final calendar on a separate page from the pivot.
[…] http://chandoo.org/wp/2012/09/12/interactive-pivot-calendar/ […]
This is perfect...is there a way to add notes/tasks to the individual days?
Excel will not let me insert blank rows between lines in the pivot table. I am use Excel 2013 - is there a pivot table tools command that must be used?
I can create the pivot table calender with a year spinner & month slicer but I do not see how to display the the attendance information that I have in the original data table.
Thank you for the wonderful post and I am sorry for my lack of understanding...
Excellent!
Please show me how to add an alternative calendar to this calendar, Chinese or lunar calendar (and by lunar I don't mean phases of the moon), like what they still use in Asia
Thanks
Christopher
[…] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. […]
Hello my name is Maurice, excuse me for my further request, but believe me, without your help priprio not know how to solve this problem.
So: always using a chart positioned on an excel sheet I wanted to match each square (series) to a single cell, to create a perpetual calendar.
Now everything works fine; except that for a fact, and it is this: In the calendar as you well know some numbers may not be apparent until certain conditions, which I solved by writing this "= O code (AA5 = DATE ( $ H $ 1; MONTH ($ AD $ 12) +1; 1)) and the game and done.
Now I would like to achieve the same thing using the Chart; How can I do to make this happen! let me also just a practical example so that I can understand all the rest then I'll do; Thanks Greetings from A.Maurizio
Link Program : Link: https://app.box.com/s/lhqva3eji0xcf2nmk8lxyki88tt1mi5t
Great info, thanks for sharing
Hi,
I love your calendar however I am modifying it for use in displaying employee performance metrics on a day by day basis.
I see where tblChosen and tblDates are named ranges however I cannot find them anywhere.
Are they assigned to specific cells because I cannot tell.
I see both of them in the Name Manager, which tells me what they refer to but does not give a value or cell location.
@Mike
With the Names in the Name Manager
Simply select the name
Then click in the Refers To: box at the Bottom
Excel will take you to where the Named Range is referring to
[…] Wow – what do you think of the interactive calendar chart demo above? To achieve this impressive effect you must have Excel 2010 because it utilises slicers, which is a feature introduced in Excel 2010. Find out how this treasure was created on Chandoo’s page. […]
Hi, Chandoo
This Pivot Calendar is an excellent idea. I’ve done one for myself using your guidelines. I just need something I’m not being able to do. I need that when I open the file the default date is set to today’s date. I know how to do it with conditional formatting. But I think I’ll need some vba coding for this. Can you please help me with this. Thanks in advance