Of all the hundreds of formulas & thousands of features in Excel, INDEX() would rank somewhere in the top 5 for me. It is a versatile, powerful, simple & smart formula. Although it looks plain, it can make huge changes to the way you analyze data, calculate numbers and present them. It is so important that, whenever I teach (live or online), I usually dedicate 25% of teaching time to INDEX().
Today lets get cozy. Lets start a fling (a very long one). Lets do something that will make you smart, happy and relaxed.
Understanding INDEX formula
In simple terms, INDEX formula gives us value or the reference to a value from within a table or range.
While this may sound trivial, once you realize what INDEX can do, you would be madly in love with it.
Few sample uses of INDEX
1. Lets say you are the star fleet commander of planet zorg. And you are looking at a list of your fleet in Excel (even in other planets they use Excel to manage data). And you want to get the name of 8th item in the list.
INDEX to rescue. Write =INDEX(list, 8)
2. Now, you want to know the captain of this 8th ship, which is in 3rd column. You guessed right, again we can use INDEX,
=INDEX(list, 8,3)
Syntax of INDEX formula
INDEX has 2 syntaxes.
1. INDEX(range or table, row number, column number)
This will give you the value or reference from given range at given row & column numbers.
2. INDEX(range, row number, column number, area number)
This will give you the value or reference from specified area at given row & column numbers.
It may be difficult to understand how these work from the syntax definition. Read on and everything will be clear.
7 reasons why INDEX is an awesome companion
Whether you are in planet zorg managing dozens of star fleet or you are in planet earth managing a list of vendors, chances are you are wrestling everyday with data, pleasing a handful of managers (and clients), delivering like a rock star all while having fun. That is why you should partner with INDEX. It can make you look smart, resourceful and fast, without compromising your existing relationship with another human being.
Data used in these examples
For all these examples (except #6), we will use below data. It is in the table named sf.
Reason 1: Get nth item from a list
You already saw this in action. INDEX formula is great for getting nth item from a list of values. You simply write =INDEX(list, n)
Reason 2: Get the value at intersection of given row & column
Again, you saw this example. INDEX formula can take a table (or range) and give you the value at nth row, mth column. Like this =INDEX(table, n, m)
Reason 3: Get entire row or column from a table
For some reason you want to have the entire or column from a table. A good example is you are analyzing star fleet ages and you want to calculate average age of all ships.
You can write =AVERAGE(age column)
or you can also use INDEX to generate the age column for you. Assuming the fleet table is named sf and age is in column 7
write =AVERAGE(INDEX(sf, ,7))
Notice empty value for ROW number. When you pass empty or 0 value to either row or column, INDEX will return entire row or column.
Likewise, if you want an entire row, you can pass either empty or 0 value for column parameter.
Reason 4: Use it to lookup left
By now you know that VLOOKUP() cannot fetch values from columns to left. It does not matter if the person looking up is the star fleet commander.
But INDEX along with MATCH can fix this problem.
Lets say you want to know which ship has maximum capacity.
- First you find what is the maximum capacity =MAX(sf[Capacity (000s tons)])
- Then you find position of of this capacity in all values =MATCH(max_capacity, sf[Capacity (000s tons)],0)
- Now, extract the corresponding ship name =INDEX(sf[Ship Name], max_capacity_position)
Or in one line, the formula becomes
=INDEX(sf[Ship Name], MATCH( MAX(sf[Capacity (000s tons)]), sf[Capacity (000s tons)], 0))
For more tips read using INDEX + MATCH combination
Reason 5: Create dynamic ranges
So far, your reaction to INDEX’s prowess might be ‘meh!’. And that is understandable. You are of course star fleet commander and it is difficult to please you. But don’t break-up with INDEX yet.
You see, the true power of INDEX lies in its nature. While you may think INDEX is returning a value, the reality is, INDEX returns a reference to the cell containing value.
So this means, a formula like =INDEX(list, 8) looks like it is giving 8th value in list.
But it is really giving a reference to 8th cell.
Since the result of INDEX is a reference, we can use INDEX in any place where we need to have a reference.
Sounds confusing?
For example, to sum up a list of values in range A1:A10, we write =SUM(A1:A10)
Now, in that formula, both A1 and A10 are references.
Since INDEX gives a reference, we can replace either (or both) A1 & A10 with INDEX formula and it still works.
so =SUM(A1 : INDEX(A1:A50,10))
will give the same result as =SUM(A1:A10)
Although the INDEX route appears overly complicated, it has other applications.
Example 1: SUM of staff in first x ships
Lets say you want to sum up staff in first ‘x’ ships in the sf table.
Since ‘x’ changes from time to time, you want a dynamic range that starts from first ship and goes up to xth ship.
Assuming ‘x’ value is in cell M1 and first ship’s staff is in cell G3,
=SUM(G3:INDEX(sf[Staff count], M1))
will give the desired result.
Example 2: A named range that refers to all ship names in column A
Many times you do not know how much data you have. Even star fleet commanders are left in dark. Lets say you are building a new ship tracking spreadsheet. Since your fleet is ever growing, you do not want to constantly update all formulas to refer to correct ranges.
For example, the ship names are in column A, from A1 to An. And you want to create a named range that points to all ships so that you can use this name elsewhere.
If you define the lstShips =A1:A10, then after you add 11th ship, you must edit this name. And you hate repetitive work.
One solution is to use OFFSET formula to define the dynamic range,
like =OFFSET(A1, 0,0, COUNTA(A:A),1)
While this works ok, since OFFSET is volatile function, it will recalculate every time something changes in your workbook. Even when someone replaces a bolt on landing gear of USS Enterprise.
This will eventually make your workbook slow.
That is where INDEX comes.
You see, INDEX is a non-volatile function*.
So you can create lstShips that points to,
=A1: INDEX(A:A, COUNTA(A:A))
*Even though INDEX is non-volatile, since we are using it in defining a range reference, Excel recalculates the lstShips every time you open the file. (reference).
Reason 6: Get any 1 range from a list of ranges
INDEX has another powerful use. You can get any one range from many ranges using INDEX.
Since you are a successful, smart & resourceful star fleet commander, you got promoted. Now you manage fleet of several planets.
And you have similar ship detail tables for each planet in a workbook. And you want to calculate average age of any planet’s ships with just one formula.
Again INDEX to rescue.
Assuming you have 3 different tables – planet1, planet2, planet3
and selected planet number is in cell C1,
write =AVERAGE(INDEX((planet1,planet2,planet3),,,C1))
The reference (planet1,planet2,planet3) will point to all data and C1 will tell INDEX which planet’s data to use.
Pretty nifty eh?!?
Reason 7: INDEX can process arrays
INDEX can naturally process arrays of data (without entering CTRL+Shift+Enter).
For example you want to find out how much staff is in the ships whose captain’s name starts with “R”.
write =SUM(INDEX((LEFT(sf[Captain],1)=“r”)*(sf[Staff count]),0))
Although LEFT(sf[Captain],1)=”r” and sf[Staff count] produce arrays, since INDEX can process arrays automatically, the result comes without CTRL+Shift+Enter
Where as if you use SUM alone =SUM((LEFT(sf[Captain],1)=”r”)*(sf[Staff count])) you have to press CTRL+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
Other formulas: SUMPRODUCT & MATCH too can process arrays automatically.
Download Example Workbook & Get close with INDEX
Since you are going to ask, “I want to spend sometime alone with INDEX in my cubicle right now!”, I made an example workbook. It explains all these powerful uses of INDEX. Go ahead and download it.
Get busy with INDEX.
How to use INDEX in Excel – Video
In this video, learn how to use INDEX formula in Excel with many real-world examples. You can also watch it here.
Why do you love INDEX?
I love INDEX(). If we get a dog, I am going to call her INDEX.
Updated on Feb 2024: We did get a dog, but we call her Excel!
That is how much I love the formula. Almost all my dashboards, complex workbooks and anything that seems magical will have a fair dose of INDEX formulas.
What about you? Do you use INDEX formula often? What are the reasons you love it? Please share your tips, usages and ideas on INDEX using comments.
Learn more about INDEX & other such lovely things in Excel
If you are whistling uncontrollably after reading so far, you are in for a real treat. Check out below articles to become awesome.
- INDEX + MATCH Combination
- Introduction to SUMIFS formula
- Dynamic Array formulas in Excel (especially FILTER) is a good alternative to INDEX
- XLOOKUP formula can do much more than INDEX
- More examples of advanced Excel formulas & INDEX
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