In the 23rd session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets talk about my experience with Hudhud cyclone.
Note: This podcast session has no Excel tips. It is a story of how our family is surviving the effects & aftermath of destructing Hudhud cyclone that recently (on 12th October) passed thru our city. Hopefully, you still find it interesting & inspiring. If you are expecting some Excel tips, check again next week.
What is in this session?
Growing up, I lived all my childhood in coastal cities. So cyclones & severe storms are not new to me. But first time, I have experienced anything as severe, destructive & long as Cyclone Hudhud. After the cyclone, we (our family and 1000s of other families in Vizag, our city) had to endure days with no power, water, cellular signals and access to essential supplies. Fortunately, great progress has been made in the last few days and things are restoring to normalcy. We (our locality) is expecting to have power & regular water supply by this Sunday (19th of October).
In this podcast, you will know,
- My experience with Hudhud cyclone
- What I gained from it
- What I am thankful for
Listen to this podcast
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Transcript of this session:.
Full transcript of this podcast will be uploaded once it is ready.
Have you experienced anything similar? Please share your stories & thoughts with us
If you ever had a close encounter with a natural calamity, you know what I am talking about. Go ahead and share your stories, good thoughts and blessings in the comments. Thanks for your support.
PS: As of now, we have driven to a small city 150 miles away from our home as we ran out of water & our back-up electric supply thru Solar panels failed yesterday night. We will return home by Sunday.
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...