In the 28th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s figure out how to express business rules & logic to Excel.
What is in this session?
What good are spreadsheets if they can’t solve business problems?
But we all struggle when it comes to modeling real world business conditions in Excel. For example, if you have below business rule to decide how much discount to offer a customer,
- If the customer bought 3 or more times previously and offer 15% discount
- If the customer bought 1 or 2 times previously AND customer’s age is >40, offer 10% discount
- If the customer visited our New York store between 6PM-9PM offer 5% discount
- Else no discount
How would you go about modeling these in Excel?
That is our topic for this podcast session.
In this podcast, you will learn
- The challenge of modeling business logic & rules in Excel
- My struggles with such formulas in early days
- 4 features of Excel that can help you with this.
- 1. Logical formulas
- AND
- OR
- NOT
- XOR
- 2. Support formulas
- IF
- IFERROR
- CHOOSE
- 3. Information formulas
- IS functions
- 4. Operators
- Brackets
- +*- operators
- Example business rules & how to write formulas for them
- Conclusions
Listen to this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Click here to download the MP3 file.
Links & Resources mentioned in this podcast
Logical formulas – Syntax & Examples:
Support functions & concepts:
Advanced business rules & scenarios:
Homework for you:
- Write a formula to check if 2 dates are in same month
- Write a formula to check if few cells have same value
- An IF formula challenge for you
- Can you calculate sales commission?
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
What challenges do you face when modeling business rules / logic?
When I was learning Excel, I struggled a few years understanding the concept of logical functions. Of course I was in college, so I had all the time in world to explore and learn.
What about you? Do you write formulas that model real world logic? Where do you struggle? Please share your thoughts & inputs in comments section so that I can help you better.
IF(AND(like chandoo.org, love podcast),
If you like chandoo.org & our podcast, please take a minute and do one or both of below:
- Leave a honest review on iTunes
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17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!