Today lets learn about Excel CHOOSE() function.
CHOOSE eh? What does it do?
To understand CHOOSE() and appreciate its uses, lets invent an imaginary boss-subordinate pair.
Jasmine is the boss. She is, well, lets call her peculiar. She likes olives, Tuesdays & color Red. She hates potatoes.
Martin is the faithful butler of Jasmine. He is obedient, quirky and tall. He likes lotuses, Fridays & color blue. He hates potassium.
Enter Jasmine’s scarf problem:
Jasmine likes to wear a different colored scarf every weekday. She likes to wear Red colored scarf on Mondays & Tuesdays. She likes to put on the blue polka dot scarf on Wednesdays. On Thursdays, she wears her olive colored scarf. On Fridays & Saturdays, she prefers the lovely orange blue scarf. Sundays are no scarf days.
No wonder she is peculiar.
On the first day of his job, Martin understood this schedule. Although he did raise his eyebrows (in bewilderment) more than once, he knew a butler should never question.
So everyday, soon after waking up, Martin would open up the list of scarf requirements, and figure out the scarf for that day. He would then neatly lay it out on Jasmine’s bed while she is in the shower.
Soon this all got boring.
So Martin thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if I can feed the scarf schedule to a computer so it automatically told me which scarf to choose everyday morning!.”
Martin reached out to his ninja computer friend who knew how to do this.
YOU.
Your Excel solution for Jasmine’s scarf problem
After hearing the entire story, raising eyebrows a few times and looking at Martin with eyes full of pity, you set out to create an Excel workbook that told him which scarf to pick on any given date.
It is simple & elegant.
In the Cell B3, you wrote =TODAY()
so that everyday A3 will tell what is the latest date.
In B4, you wrote =WEEKDAY(B3)
Then in B5, you wrote a lengthy nested IF formula to figure out the scarf of the day.
Scarf of the day formula:
=IF(B4=1,"No scarf",IF(B4<=3,"Red scarf",IF(B4=4,"Blue polka dot scarf", IF(B4=5,"Olive colored scarf","Orange blue scarf"))))
Martin couldn’t be happier. Now that he has an awesome Excel file telling him what scarf to pick everyday, he has one less thing to worry.
BUT….
Soon after your Excel file, Jasmine had to replace the polka dot scarf with yellow striped one (she slipped an olive on the scarf while eating and it left a permanent mark).
While at it, she also changed the schedule.
And now, Martin is back to square one.
Late that week, he explained the problem to you over a drink. You quickly modified the file to suit new scarf of the day scenario.
The formula now looked like this:
=IF(B4=1,"No scarf",IF(OR(B4=2,B4=4),"Red scarf",IF(B4=3,"Yellow striped scarf", IF(B4=5,"Olive colored scarf","Orange blue scarf"))))
Thats when you got thinking.
The nested IF formula is awfully long and clumsy to maintain. May be there is a better one?!?
Enter CHOOSE formula, built for scarf of the day & more
CHOOSE() formula works beautifully for situations like this.
Instead of the long & clumsy nested IF formula, you could simply write a choose formula.
Syntax of the CHOOSE formula:
The CHOOSE formula is simple to write.
=CHOOSE(some number, value 1, value 2, value 3....)
and CHOOSE will pick a value based on some number.
For example,
=CHOOSE(3,"Chandoo.org","makes","you","awesome")
will result in you.
Scarf of the day CHOOSE Formula:
For our scarf of the day, the choose formula looks like this:
=CHOOSE(B4,"No scarf","Red scarf","Yellow striped scarf", "Red scarf","Olive scarf","Orange blue scarf","Orange blue scarf")
(or this if you want it for schedule prior to olive accident, =CHOOSE(B4,"No scarf","Red scarf","Red scarf","Blue polka dot scarf", "Olive scarf","Orange blue scarf","Orange blue scarf") )
Okay, what else can CHOOSE() do?
CHOOSE cant make you tall, rich or beautiful yet. But, it can do few more things.
Here is one such powerful example.
Fetch one range from many using CHOOSE
We can use CHOOSE() to fetch one of the many ranges, like this:
=SUM(CHOOSE(2, A1:A10, B1:B10,C1:C10,D1:D10))
This will result in the sum of the 2nd range, ie B1:B10.
Here is an interesting example of this:
How many values can CHOOSE take?
CHOOSE() can take up to 254 different values and return one of them based on the index number (first parameter).
What if I have more than 254?
Forget 254. Anytime you want to choose one value from more than a few (say 10), CHOOSE formula becomes tedious (as you have to select individual value cells or type them).
For all such cases (ie when you have list of values more than 10), I suggest using INDEX(). It is a powerful & versatile formula designed to handle situations like this.
Example workbook:
Here is the example workbook on CHOOSE. When you click the link, it opens Excel inside browser so you can practice this anywhere.
Do you CHOOSE?
I write CHOOSE() formulas often. It is a simple formula and I find several uses for it.
What about you? Do you use CHOOSE()? What are some of your favorite uses of it? Please share your thoughts using comments.
More examples on CHOOSE
Check out these additional examples to learn more:
31 Responses to “Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you”
Would be considerably easier just to have a table with the variance shown.
On Step 3, how do you "Add budget and actual values to the chart again"?
There are a few ways to do it.
Easy:
1) Copy just the numbers from both columns (Select, CTRL+C)
2) Select the chart and hit CTRL+V to paste. This adds them to chart.
Traditional:
1) Right click on chart and go to "select data..."
2) From the dialog, click on "Add" button and add one series at a time.
One more way to accomplish it is just select the columns into chart. Press Ctrl+C and then press Ctrl+V
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me in Excel 2010. The "Var 1" and "Var 2" columns cannot combine two fonts to display the symbol and the figure side-by-side.
Secondly, there is no option to Click on “Value from cells” option when formatting the label options. The only options provided are Series Name, Category Name or Value.
@TheQ47... the emoji font also has normal English letters, so if you use that font, then you should be ok. I am assuming your computer doesn't have that font or hasn't been upgraded for emoji support.
Reg. Excel 2010, you can manually link each label to a cell value. Just select one label at a time (click on labels, wait a second, click on an individual label) and press = and link it to the label var 1 or var 2.
I am using excel 2010, please explain how to apply Step 12
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Neeraj,
"Value from cells" option is only available in Excel 2013 or above. In older versions, you have to manually adjust the label value by linking each label seperately.
Read this please: https://chandoo.org/wp/change-data-labels-in-charts/
Sir, you are just awesome.
Your creativity has no limit.
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Chandoo,
I just found your website, and really love it. It helps me a lot to be an Excel expert 😉
Currently I am facing with a problem at step 11:
Var1 Var2
D30%
A5%
B0%
B4%
B7%
C10%
C13%
D27%
I42%
Though at mapping table, I used windings, here formula uses calibra. How I can change it? I am able to change only the whole cell. In this case numbers will be Windings too.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mariann... Welcome to Chandoo.org and thanks for your comment.
If you wanted to use symbols from wingdings and combine them with % numbers, then you need to setup two labels. One with symbol, in wingdings font and another with value in normal font. Just add the same series again to the chart, make it invisible, add labels. You may need to adjust the alignment / position of label so everything is visible.
[…] firs article explains how you can enhance your charts with symbols. You can simply insert any supported symbol into your data and charts. To some extend you can […]
You're a good person, thank you to share your knowledge with us, I will try to do in my work
Great visualization of variance. My question is that is this possible in powerbi?
How would you go about it?
HELLO, WHY CANT I FIND VALUES FOR LABELS IN EXCEL 2013
Dear chanddo sir,
What to do if we have dynamic range for Chart. How this will work. can you able to make the same thing works on dynamic range.
Sir Chandoo,
Good Day!
First, I'd like to say that I am very grateful for your work and for sharing all these things with us.
I tried to do this chart but it seems that the symbols don't work with text (abs(var%),"0%") unless we keep the Windings font style.
The problem is, it converts the text into symbol as well and you wont see the 0% anymore. I'm using Windows 7.
WOW - Segoe UI Emoji
This is the greatest discovery for me this month 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Here's my two-cents:
https://wmfexcel.com/2019/02/17/a-compelling-chart-in-three-minutes/
Sir This is awesome chart, and very easy to made because of your way to explain is very simple , everyone can do. Thank you
one problem i am facing, I hv made this chart , but when i am inserting data table to chart it is showing two times , how can i resolve this
in this chart when i am adding new month data for example first i made this chart jan to mar but when i add data for the apr month graphs updated automatically but labels are missing for that new month
Hi Renuka,
Please make sure the formulas for labels are also calculated for extra months. Just drag down the series and set label range to appropriate address.
So I am playing with the Actual chart here - but amounts are bigger than your - you have 600 as Budget - my budget is 104,000 - is there a way to shorten that I am unaware of
thank you - I LOVE YOUR SITE
Thanks for the tips and tricks on Excel. In the Planned versus Actual chart examples, you use multiple values (ex. multiple Categories in above). How can this be done when we have only 1 set of values? For example if I have only this:
Planned Actual
SOW Budget 417480 367551
How can I create a single bar chart like the one above?
Thank you Chandoo.
This one is just perfect for my Quarterly Review presentation on Operational Budget against Actual Performance for the Hospital I'm currently working with.
Just Subscribed today (10 minutes ago)
Is there a way to make the table of data into a pivot table to be able to add a slicer for the graph due to many different categories and months?
Hi, I tried to modify you template with something appropriate for me, and I found a problem. this template was modified by me started with excel 2010, then 2016 and finally 2019. Same thing - somehow appear an error - or didn't show the emoticons for positive percentage or doubled the emoticons for some rows. I suspect to be from excel. if is need it I can sand you my xlsx for study. Please help if you can.
Hi Chandoo,
Could you please check the Var Formula in Step1. You have mentioned budget-actual and when i did this i got different values but when reversed like actual-budget i got the actual value what you have demonstrated in step1.
Please share your view.
This is a great chart (budget vs. actual). However, in trying recreate it, I cannot color in the UP Down bars individually, and they all become formatted with the same color. I'm using Office 365. Look forward to the feedback.
Thanks.
Dan
pls explain in detail step 7
While in the Excel sheet you have used following formula for Var
Var = Actual - Budget
But
in the note, you have written
Var = Budget - Actual
Good Presentation and Data information.thank you so much chandoo.