Thank you and Excel, We have a new car

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Hi friends, readers & fans of Chandoo.org,

I want to share a happy news with you all.

On Saturday (1st of February), we bought a new car. It is Toyota Innova. Pictures below (click to enlarge.)

Jo my wife taking delivery of our new car - Toyota Innova. You can see my mom & kids too in the picture.

Thank you & Excel

Before I tell you why I bought another car or how it is, first let me tell you this – Thank you. You constantly inspire me to learn more and share my knowledge. You support my little business in numerous ways – by joining our courses, purchasing our templates and recommending our site. With out your support and love, I would not even thought about buying a comfortable and lovely car like this. Thank you.

And I want to thank Microsoft Excel too. It is the reason why today my family is living a happy, healthy and peaceful life. Thank you Excel.

Why another car?

My kids and my niece infront our new car

Long time readers of Chandoo.org remember that we already have a car. And if you know me, you know that I like to consume less and lead a frugal life. So adding another car to our family seemed like a conflicting choice. But we (my wife Jo & I) rationalized this by,

  • Our current car doesn’t have any security features (no airbags, ABS etc.) So when we go on long drives, we have this nagging thoughts in our minds.
  • Our current car is good for 4 people. As we frequently travel with other family members or friends, going out became an exercise in human squeezing.
  • Driving Alto is fun, but driving it for anything more than an hour proved to a back-breaking punishment.

After spending few weeks short-listing car models, we narrowed down to our choice to Toyota Innova. Almost everyone we asked said, ‘Get Innova, it is boringly reliable’. It matched our expectations.

A little more about our car

  • Our car is Innova ZX variant.
  • It can seat 7 people (2,2 and 3)
  • It has good safety features (2 airbags, ABS etc.)
  • It drives like a car instead of MPV. Very convenient and comfortable.
  • It has all the features you would expect in a car of this size.
  • We paid roughly Rs. 1,800,000 (US $28,000) for this. No loan of course (I do not like buying things that I cannot afford.)

Our car from side

 

Thank you once again

Almost everyday I wake up with a smile, spend the day learning, feeling passionate about my work and go to sleep thinking nothing but how fortunate and blessed my family & I are. All thanks to you. Thanks to your kind support, generous attitude and love for learning, we have a home, car and all the comforts anyone can ask for. Thank you.

And thank you Microsoft & Excel for making my life exciting every day.

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12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”

  1. Peder Schmedling says:

    Some great contributions here.
    Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀

  2. Aires says:

    Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂

    (BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )

  3. John Franco says:

    Great compilation Chandoo

    For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
    =VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)

    I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:

    =VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)

  4. Chandoo says:

    @Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
    @Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
    @John.. that is a cool tip.

  5. Eric Lind says:

    Hey Chandoo,

    That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.

    What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.

    You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)

    Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.

    Week1 Week2
    10 11
    12 9
    9 10
    7 8
    5 8

    Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK

    In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
    In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
    Check "Labels"
    In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.

    .05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.

    Select a range output.

    Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.

    You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.

    So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.

    Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!

    Thanks!

    Eric~

  6. Balaji OS says:

    Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
    Thanks to all the contributors

    OS

  7. Locke says:

    Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
    Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")

    I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)

  8. Johan says:

    Extract the month from a date
    The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
    It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.

  9. anjali says:

    if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u

  10. Hui... says:

    @Anjali

    If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2

    If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2

  11. sajid says:

    kindly share with me new forumulas.

  12. Biswajit Baidya says:

    How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.

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