Recently, I had a peculiar problem. I have a list of zip codes and I wanted to find out nearest zip codes for each of them.
Now, If I wanted to find out near by zip codes for one area, I could go and search in Google. But, how to do it for dozens of them?
Today, lets understand how you can use Excel (that’s right) to do this automatically. We will be using Excel 2013 for this.
A little background – Excel 2013 Web Formulas
In Excel 2013, Microsoft has introduced 3 powerful new formulas. These will help you fetch & parse XML / HTML data from web. The formulas are,
- ENCODEURL: to encode web URLs (replaces special characters in URLs with % codes like space becomes %20, / becomes %2F etc…)
- WEBSERVICE: connects to a webservice / website and fetches response as XML / HTML.
- FILTERXML: extracts a portion of XML/HTML using specified XPATH.
Using these formulas and web services, we can quickly fetch near by zipcodes for any input value.
Step 1: Find a web-service that can tell us near by zipcodes
I am sure there are many web sites that can offer a service like this. After searching a while, I came across a website called as geonames.org which has many webservices around address / zip code search. The service I have used is,
This service is available as XML & JSON. Since Excel 2013 formulas only process XML data, I went with XML service. The service API url is this:
http://api.geonames.org/findNearbyPostalCodes?postalcode=ZIPCODE&country=US&radius=15&username=UNAME&maxRows=10
ZIPCODE is where you enter the zipcode from which you want to find nearby zipcodes
UNAME is where you enter your user name for geonames.org. Click here to register with geonames.org.
Step 2: List all original Zip codes in a column
This is simple. Just paste all original zip codes in a column.
Step 3: Write WEBSERVICE Formula
First enter the API URL in a cell like B1. (Make sure your user name is included in the service url)
Now write WEBSERVICE formulas so that we can fetch XML listing for each of the zip codes. Assuming zip codes are in A3:Ax, in adjacent column write =WEBSERVICE(SUBSTITUTE($B$1,”ZIPCODE”,A3))
And drag it down to fill down the formula for all zipcodes.
Step 4: Write FILTERXML formulas
Now that we have full XML corresponding to each zip code, we need to parse this XML to extract the nearby zip code numbers. The original XML looks something like this:
To extract the zipcodes alone, we need to use FILTERXML formula.
FILTERXML takes 2 inputs – XML text, Xpath.
XML text is what WEBSERVICE has generated.
XPATH will tell Excel, which portion of XML to extract.
What is XPATH?
If you imagine XML as a tree, then XPATH is the language you use to tell how to navigate to a certain node in that tree. Since XPATH is a complex world, I think explaining all the syntax & nuances can be hard. So I will leave you with 2 useful links.
So what is the XPATH for nearby zip code.
As you can see in above image, the response from geonames has 10 code nodes, each containing one zip code (in the postalcode child node).
If we write =FILTERXML(b3,”/geonames/code/postalcode”) we will get all the postalcodes as an array.
Since Excel cannot show arrays in cells, it will show one of the 10 values.
So we need 10 cells to show these 10 zip codes. Once you have 10 cells, you can use either INDEX formula or alternative XPATH syntax (/geonames/code[1]/postalcode for first code, ../code[2]/.. for second code etc.) to extract all the 10 zip codes.
Things to keep in mind
Web formulas (WEBSERVICE formula to be specific) can be really slow depending on your net connection and webserver speeds. Since for most data, we do not need a live connection once the data is fetched, it would be good idea to replace WEBSERVICE formula with results once you have the XML.
Also, working with XPATH can be frustrating if the source XML is not correctly formatted or you are not familiar with right XPATH commands. In such cases, use SUBSTITUE or Text formulas to strip away un-necessary portions of webservice text before feeding it to FILTERXML.
Last but not least, Web formulas are compatible only with Excel 2013 or above. So you need to replace all formulas with results when emailing the workbooks to colleagues who are using older versions of Excel.
Download Example File – Finding Nearby Zipcodes
Click here to download the Excel workbook. Play with it to understand how the formulas are working. Please note that this file is protected as I do not want you to use my username for geonames.org.
Do you use Excel Web formulas?
Although Excel 2013 includes only 3 web formulas, they can let us do several interesting things. I am playing with them often to see what additional uses we can put them to.
What about you? Have you used Excel 2013 web formulas? What is your experience like? Please share using comments.
More on using Excel to get data from web
If you often need data from external websites for your Excel analysis work, check out below articles too:
30 Responses to “Rescue oddly shaped data – Battle between Formulas, VBA and Power Query”
Nice use of Power Query! Power Query is simply awesome! But somehow a lot of people are punishing themselves by not using it (not learning it).
An imperfect 4th approach for consideration... no codes at all...
Select myrange.
Go to Special --> Blank
Delete Cell --> Shift cell left
90% done... now we just need to move the data of 2nd column to the bottom of 1st column
Of course... Power Query is the best.
Cheers,
There is another way but it involves multiple steps:
Copy the values in column E, move the cursor to F5, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
Copy the values in column D, move the cursor to F8, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
And so on.
This works perfectly, albeit a little clumsily apart from the values in B17 and C16, which can be moved with simple copy and paste
Power Query Forever! I do not know how I survived for so long without knowing and using this tool, I can not recommend it to my colleagues, but by the way they prefer to suffer to learn.
My congratulations here from Brazil.
I rolled my eyes when I saw that data
Using decimal places is a nice trick to order data, thanks for that
And tweaking the first formula a bit, you can use OFFSET instead of INDIRECT
=OFFSET($A$1, MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange)), ROWS(A$1:A1))-1, RIGHT(TEXT(MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001), ROWS(A$1:A1)), ".00000"), 5)-1)
Tried the above formula with the downloaded oddly shaped data file and I could not get it to work. I get #value without ctrl+shift+enter, and #ref with ctrl+shift+enter.
Sorry, it was SMALL, not MIN.
Add with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.
Thank you for your formula. Like the indirect formula I tested this one in older versions of EXCEL and it worked without ALTERATION in EXCEL 95. Very impressive.
Too complicated
Use =Sum to summarize all the sells to the left and Bobs Your Uncle
@Bertie... I am afraid that won't work when you have more than one value in a row.
I tested this formula in versions of Excel all the way back to Excel 95
=IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
So there are multiple ways of cleaning up messy data by formulas.
Wow.. Excel 95. Who knew people still use that. But as you have shown, Excel has all these beautiful and powerful functions for 23 years. It has data sciency stuff before DS was even a thing.
I had a problem with pasting the formula in the original post.
Formula should be: =IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
EXCEL even in a 16 bit version, is a very robust and capable program.
I don't like the VBA code. If you have a blank row in MyRange, the last entry in the range is doubled up in the paste.here range.
Not really. The macro is writing one cell at a time from paste.here. You have to clean the range before, which I was too lazy to write. But a line like Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents should do the trick.
Adding Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents fixed the problem.
for step split column by delimiter i am not getting option of split into rows or columns. Can you help me in this
Thanks Chandoo for promoting Power Query.
To simplify further, you can "Unpivot Columns" instead of right click on the newly created column and split it by comma in to rows in step 3 of Power Query.
i used
=LOOKUP(10000,B5:F5)
and got the answers. I just plagiarized this formula somewhere and use it, maybe you can explain why it works.
Regards
@Johan... I am not sure if the formula works correctly. When I tested it with the sample data in this post, it showed #N/As in two cells. Essentially, it will only give first value in each row. So if a row has multiple values, then subsequent values are missed. LOOKUP() function goes thru a list and finds the first value that is less than or equal to the input - in this case 10000 in B5:F5.
I have the need to convert pdf's to excel on occasion and they often come out a mess like this. I have used:
Cell G2 =COUNT(myrange)
Cell G3 =IFERROR(IF(G2-1<1,"",G2-1),"") copied down to G100
Cell H2 =IFERROR(LARGE(myrange,G2),"") copied down to H100
Waouw...
=IFERROR(INDIRECT("R" & SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange "", ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),
ROWS(A$1:A1)), "00000.00000"), ".", "C"), FALSE), "")
but CTRL Shift Enter with {} before and after 🙂 😀
Here's a way with pivot table
https://www.bookkempt.com/2018/02/aligning-non-contiguous-data.html
This is brilliant. Bookmarked 🙂
Another possibility.
This assumes that you have a row index 'k' to use in the SMALL function and a column index 'h' to identify the columns of 'myRange'.
If you define 'coord' to refer to
=k+h/10 [assuming h<10]
then it will be possible to recover values later based upon location within 'myRange'. The formula 'nb' that identifies non-blanks by coordinates is given by
= SMALL( IF(myRange"", coord), k )
Finally, to unpick the pieces
= INDEX( myRange, INT(nb), 10*MOD(nb, 1) )
Whilst I am here and making trouble the PQ solution is also a tad over-complicated. All that is needed is to unpivot the entire table and remove the Attribute column.
The advanced editor would show
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myRange"]}[Content],
#"Unpivoted Columns" = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Source, {}, "Attribute", "Value"),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Unpivoted Columns",{"Attribute"})
in
#"Removed Columns"
1.fill the blank cells with 0
2.the requested column value=sum of those mess number column
but this can be used in only one column has value
Chandoo
And if we use the formula SEARCH (100000000, B5: F5)
JC
Another approach with Power Query, it will still work if the number of columns changed:
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myrange"]}[Content],
#"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(Source, "List", each Record.ToList(_)),
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Added Custom",{"List"}),
#"Expanded LIst" = Table.ExpandListColumn(#"Removed Other Columns", "List"),
#"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(#"Expanded LIst", each ([List] null))
in
#"Filtered Rows"
Cool idea to use Record.ToList as added column. Thanks for sharing this.
Nowadays, you can just use TOCOL on Excel 2024, MS 365, and Web Excel. It has a parameter to ignore blanks/errors/both.