If this Excel problem is a Bollywood (Indian movie) plot, it would go like this:
Situation: Your boss gave you a worksheet. It has a lot of number chunks. And you need to calculate the sum of each chunk. Quickly!
Twist #1: The villain (your boss, who else) has abducted your spouse. For every extra hour you spend on the problem, your boss will make your spouse go thru one of the boring 97 slide strategy presentations. And his laptop is full of those strategy presentations.
Twist #2: The F1 key on your keyboard is missing.
Twist #3: The coffee machine in your floor is broken again.
Twist #4: And just when you are pressing CTRL+S, the movie steers in to an item song.
—-
Fortunately, no one abducted your spouse. And hopefully the coffee machine is working. But the Excel problem remains unsolved.
Sporadic totals
This problem is based on a call I received last week from one of our readers in UK. He had a worksheet full of numbers with blank rows between every few numbers. And he wants to calculate the totals of individual chunks of numbers quickly. He cannot write one formula and paste it everywhere as the chunks are not uniformly sized. He cannot write individual formulas as the data is very large.
So what to do?
If we are still in a Bollywood film, you can write all the 10,000 formulas and simultaneously sipping screwdrivers & shimmying to a snazzy song with sexy starlets.
Alas, this is not a movie.
But we still manage to look awesome. Thanks to superb sidekicks – Goto Special & Autosum.
Calculating Sporadic Totals in a second
See this short video to understand how to calculate sporadic totals in a few seconds. With the time saved, you could fix yourself a cocktail (or coffee) and hum a beautiful song.
Watch the video on our YouTube Channel or Facebook Page.
Sporadic Totals – Alternative treatment
It is an awesome co-incidence that both MrExcel (Bill Jelen) and Kevin Lehrbass also published videos about this concept around the same time. MrExcel shows how to use VBA to do this, where as Kevin talks about using formulas. Check out both videos too.
Not enough sporadic data? Try this practice file
If you want to practice this technique, use this Excel file.
Leave the drama to movies, Learn Excel
We all love film drama like blowing up cars, high-speed chases, super-human stunts and spicy songs. But you sure don’t want that in your life. So learn Excel. Save time, use that to enjoy the drama elsewhere.
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23 Responses to “Learn Top 10 Excel Features”
What it looks like if excel without formula?? 🙂
It would be not excel it would just be fancy tables in which you could just use power point. (Chandoo) would Access be an alternative?
Awesome piece of work!!!
Great article.
Chandoo - my biggest interest in the article was the awesome word-graphic at the top - where did you go to get it done into a shape?
@Rich.. thank you. I used http://www.tagxedo.com/ to generate this word cloud. I took all the comments in the original post, pasted them in tagxedo website and set up the shape etc.
Awesome Chandoo.. You need always needs coffee to start up with. BTW , how did u created the Heart Shaped picture filled with High Repetitive text in it .. Please put it on your Next blog ...
Chandoo, good article. I’ve added a link to it from Connexion – our collection of the most useful and interesting spreadsheet-related articles from the web. See http://www.i-nth.com/resources/connexion
Hi,
Just one small question. Where the hell have been I in the past for not discovering this website sooner?
I've lost a job interview recently where even though I had the subject knowledge, I was not upto their mark in Excel.
Thank you for all the free tips, guidance and for creating this forum environment.
[PS: I've just been through the site for the 1st time, and have signed up for the newsletter. You can expect pretty stupid questions from me soon]
Hy Chandoo, you always inspire me with to explore something new in excel. This data structure table is only for excel 2007 or compatible to 2010. I recently installed latest excel version 2013 in my System and experience problems regarding operating according to previous one. I'm waiting your article relates to that excel version.
Thanks
Awesome article Mr. Chandoo and that is a awesome heart shaped pic you created. Great tips as well.
[...] Learn Top 10 Excel Features | Chandoo.org – Learn Microsoft Excel Online. [...]
Chandoo is awesome..
Thanks, i got better, And i always get 90.50 in my grade card but now i get 96.50 i improved because of the tutorials you gave, Thank You Very Much Chandoo Guy.
Hi chandoo, i am intersted in seeing the video or step by step done procedure of analysing the comments and presenting in the data percentage steps. I think this one would be first step in finding out how generally happens data calculation. Thank you.
As well i would like to know how to get that black shape art of your face which i see in chandoo. I am interested in making it for me.
Nice to see the features considered by Excel users to be most useful. It might be a good idea to also analyze StackOverflow Excel questions to see what keywords appear most often.
Here are my top 10 Excel Features (for advanced users):
http://www.analystcave.com/excel-10-top-excel-features/
Thanks a ton for this it totally helped with my homework ????
Very good effort
Thank you for this. Lots of learning in the links you've provided for this septuagenarian.
Pls send me new post
Dude, your humor ? ?
Loved your work.
Hello Sir,
I am Sanjeev Khakre and i from Indore City, India , I am your big follower and i have watch your videos and learnt a lots of excel trick or function and many more . thanks so much for all of your excellent support.
Your excel knowledge is real awesome.
Thanks
Sanjeev
Your work is excellent but pls willing to know more details about the features of microsoft excel
Chandoo Would Access be a better alternative than VB?