Lets start the week with a quick tip.
Lets say you have a list of employees and their birthdays. Now you want to sort this list, based on their birthday, not age. How would you do it?
Sorting by day and month alone:
- Add a column next to original dates. Lets call this Birthday.
- Then, calculate birthday in current year for everyone.
- Assuming DOB is in B1, Formula for birthday (in current year) would be,
=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(B2),DAY(B2)) - This formula gives you a date which has same year as TODAY(), same month & day as original date.
- Then, fill down the formula for all rows.
- Now sort this new column (Birthday) in chronological order.
- You are done!
Note: if you are using tables, then use this formula.
(Assuming original date is in DOB column),
=DATE(YEAR(TODAY()), MONTH([@DOB]),DAY([@DOB]))
Related: Introduction to Tables & Structural References.
More Sorting Examples:
- Sorting sideways
- Sorting in Olympic medals table style, Formula 1 racing style
- Rounding and sorting data
- Checking if a list is sorted using formulas
- Sorting text values using formulas
Homework for you:
If you think sorting by birthdays is easier than eating a birthday cake, then I have a challenge for you. Assuming a list of data of births is in the range A1:A100, write a formula to find how many birthdays are in this month?
Go ahead and post your answers in comments.
13 Responses to “Data Validation using an Unsorted column with Duplicate Entries as a Source List”
Pivot Table will involve manual intervention; hence I prefer to use the 'countif remove duplicate trick' along with 'text sorting formula trick; then using the offset with len to name the final range for validation.
if using the pivot table, set the sort to Ascending, so the list in the validation cell comes back alphabetically.
Hui: Brillant neat idea.
Vipul: I am intrigued by what you are saying. Please is it possible to show us how it can be done, because as u said Hui's method requires user intervention.
Thks to PHD and all
K
Table names dont work directly inside Data validation.
You will have to define a name and point it to the table name and then use the name inside validation
Eg MyClient : Refers to :=Table1[Client]
And then in the list validation say = MyClient
Kieranz,
Pls download the sample here http://cid-e98339d969073094.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/data-validation-unsorted-list-example.xls
Off course there are many other ways of doing the same and integrating the formulae in multiple columns into one.
Pls refer to column FGHI in that file. Cell G4 is where my validation is.
Vipul:
Many thks, will study it latter.
Rgds
K
[...] to chandoo for the idea of getting unique list using Pivot tables. What we do is that create a pivot table [...]
@Vipul:
Thanks, that was awesome! 🙂
@Playercharlie Happy to hear that 🙂
Great contribution, Hui. Solved a problem of many years!
Thanks to you, A LOT
Hi Hui,
Greeting
hope you are doing well.
I'm interested to send you a private vba excel file which i need to show detail of pivot in new workbook instead of showing in same workbook as new sheet.
Please contact me on muhammed.ye@gmail.com
Best Regards