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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10 Responses to “Multiple Find Replace with Power Query List.Accumulate()”
Note: The text-formula above miss a -1. The video is correct.
😀 sorry, I made the exact same mistake as you did - initially - in the video. {0..3} is one thing, and Table.RowCount(replacements) -->3 items ={0,1,2} is another thing.
1st question : you've created a new column to put the replacements in. how ca we replace in the original column without creating a new one ?
2nd question : how can we replace the value in the entire cell and not only the text (Using ReplaceValue instead of text.Replace) ?
Thanks you in advance
Chandoo, I would be very interested to have your answers in both Yassine's questions!
Thank you for sharing,
Vassilis
Thank you for this! I was just doing an assignment where I was having to replace words with other words in my Excel sheet. We are starting with the basics in my class, so I know I don't have a huge list that I would need to find and replace, but this is something that could be useful down the road for me!
Hi
This is nearly perfect for my needs thank you, however I would like just the "replace" to be the result if possible please, I have tried in vain adjusting the formula without success.
Thank you in advance
Thank you! Awesome tip, and very flexible, too.
My find/replace values were in non-adjacent columns of a table containing a bunch of other data. Worked prefectly and I am now a tiny bit less clueless.
Hi!!!
I have the same question that Yassine did.
I need to replace the values in the same column. I don't want to create a new column e then have to remove the old column.
How could I could that?
That's a real fun article. It inspired me to delve deeper into the topic of List.Accumulate. I can see how the function works, but it takes an additional step to imagine how one can use it for more complex applications.
Your example also made it into my article, together with some other use-cases. Would be great to get your opinion on which other areas you would include in the article.
Let me drop the link to the page so others can too find it for further reading: https://gorilla.bi/power-query/list-accumulate/
Expression.Error: The name 'replacements' wasn't recognized. Make sure it's spelled correctly.