Occasionally we deal with data that is so uncooperative that we might as well give up and go back to calculators & ledger books.
Recently I found myself in such a situation and learned something new.
Introducing … data that won’t play nice
Drum roll please. Here is a data-set that I got from somewhere.
The problem – build a lookup formula
And the problem. Oh, simple. Write a lookup formula to find how many customer walk-ins we have on any given day.
But how?
After wrestling with a few variations of VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, OFFSET… I found the right formula for this occasion.
SUMIFS Formula
That’s right, the good old (well, its just 7 years old, born in 2007 Excel) is the one that works in this situation.
Assuming our data is in the range:
- B4:H15
- Even rows (4,6,8…14) containing date
- Odd rows (5,7,9…) containing customer walk-ins
- And lookup date is in L5
We can use this SUMIFS formula:
=SUMIFS(B5:H15,B4:H14,L5)
to find out how many customers walked in to the store on the lookup date.
How does this formula work?
See this illustration.
Since SUMIFS (and SUMIF too) formula works in 2D, our formula works elegantly.
Any caveats?
There are a couple of problems with this formula.
- It works for looking up numbers only
- It doesn’t work if any of the numbers are same as dates we are looking up. For example 15th October 2014 is 41927, so we have a data point that is also 41927, then our SUMIFS result would be wrong.
A better formula?
If you want a formula that works with any type of data, then of course we can come up with one.
That is your home work.
Go ahead and figure it out and share your magic potions in the comments.
Here is a clue: If we cant go somewhere directly, we can go indirectly, if we know the address.
Download Example Workbook
Click here to download the example workbook. Examine the formula in cell L6 to understand how this works.
How do you deal with such data?
Badly shaped data is everywhere. Not a week goes by when I don’t come across poorly structured data. Thanks to Excel, I can alter the shape of almost any data. My favorite techniques are – text import, power query, formulas, pivot tables, remove duplicates & go to special.
What about you? How do you deal with poorly structured data? What tools do you deploy to alter the fitness levels of your data? Please share your thoughts and tips in comments.
Don’t forget about the formula challenge.
Excel not co-operating? Its time you tamed it
Data that is messy, bosses with high expectations, coffee machines that don’t work are everywhere. Fortunately Excel can fix 2 of those 3 problems. (Sorry folks, there is no fixCoffeeMachine() macro, yet.)
Learn a few Excel tricks & concepts and you could be on your way to taming messy data & demanding bosses. Start with these:
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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