Here is an interesting twist on the good old VLOOKUP. How to find the pricing applicable for given quantity of a product?
Something like this:
Writing pricing tier lookup formula:
Meet the data:
Let’s say you have data like this:
Assume the data is in a table named pricing
PLOOKUP formula:
Okay, I am kidding. There is no PLOOKUP formula (P for Price). But we can whip our own version of PLOOKUP using other powerful formulas in Excel.
Let’s say we have product name in cell C6 and quantity in cell D6.
To find the applicable unit price of D6 units of C6 (for example 12 units of Mountain Bikes),
We can use below formula:
=SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price], pricing[Product],C6, pricing[Min. Qty],"<="&D6, pricing[Max. Qty], ">="&D6)
Remember: product prices are in the table named pricing.
How does this formula work?
This is a simple SUMIFS formula that looks at the unit price column of pricing table and sums up all unit prices that match with given product name (C6), with quantity (D6) between [Min. Qty] and [Max. Qty] columns.
In other words, this SUMIFS will narrow down to the one row containing Mountain Bike (11-25) tier and returns the price as $300, if our input is 12 units of Mountain Bike.
Oh wait..! What if the quantity is 32?
You are right, our SUMIFS is too lame to handle cases where the input quantity doesn’t fit in any of the tiers.
But, we can use a simple logic to fix this problem.
Here is the final formula that works in all situations:
=MAX( SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price], pricing[Product],C6, pricing[Min. Qty],"<="&D6, pricing[Max. Qty], ">="&D6),SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price],pricing[Product],C6,pricing[Min. Qty],""))
As you can see, we try to find the MAXIMUM of our original SUMIFS and a second SUMIFS that just looks at given product (C6) and blank value for [Min.Qty] column.
Of course, this assumes that prices go down with each tier. If your case is different, you need to alter the formula.
Download pricing tier lookup workbook:
Click here to download the example workbook. Examine the formulas and play with input data to learn how this works. There are two bonus goodies in the workbook.
- The conditional formatting on order form is slick.
- There is an alternative solution with INDEX+MATCH formulas in the data worksheet.
More variations of lookup problems:
Here are few more ways to lookup tricky data:
- Similar problem: Range lookup – find which range contains lookup value
- Case sensitive lookups
- VLOOKUP the last value
- Multi-condition lookup
- Lookup first non-blank value
- More ways to lookup your data
How would you write PLOOKUP?
While the SUMIFS approach works well, it does feel a bit long. Can you think of other ways to write pricing tier lookup formula? Post your answers in the comments section. Teach us something new.
21 Responses to “Distinct count in Excel pivot tables”
The distinct count option works well but I have found that if I have a date field and want to group by year, month, etc. that option seems to be disabled. I need to do both, distinct count and group by year/month.
Example data; sales orders with item quantities with dates.
Challenge; sum the item quantities, count the distinct orders and group by month. How do I do this?
Perhaps that's not possible due to the grouping?
@Al... When you use data model based pivots, you cannot group values manually anymore. Why not use Excel 2016's default date grouping option? In this case we have just a few dates, so Excel is not grouping them, but if you have an year's worth of data, when you make the pivot with date in the row label area, Excel automatically groups them. If you have fewer dates or want to use your own grouping, just create a table with all dates, add columns with month, week, year etc. Then connect this table (these types of tables are usually called as calendar tables) to your data on date field as a relationship. Now you can create reports by month, quarter etc easily.
Is this the only way to do it in 2013? I find it rather cumbersome to have to create another data table listing dates with the another column for MONTH() and YEAR() to be able to summarise data for senior level...
I know people find adding calendar tables cumbersome, but it is a best practice and let's you add more layers of analysis quite easily. For example, adding analysis by weekday vs. weekend or by financial quarter or YTD calculations (you would need either Power Pivot DAX or some very carefully setup pivot table value field settings)
I had absolutely no idea this was possible. Very useful, nice work!
Doesn't work for 2010 version though (or at least not my works version)
Hi ,
The post has the following in it :
These instructions work only in Excel 2016, Office 365 and Excel 2013.
when i have 2 different Pivot tables, one without the enabled “Add this data to data model” option, and the other one with it enabled.. is there anyway i can link slicers between them?
if the answer is NO,, what to do ?
Quick note, the “Add this data to data model” option is not available for the Mac version.
perhaps outside scope of this article but I have found when I attempt to create a pivot table from an external data source (connection to a sql view) the "Add this data to data model" becomes greyed out. Anybody experienced and found a solution so I can start getting distinct count in my pivot tables?
Is there a way to still add a calculated field when using distinct count?
I found I can't change the date source after tick the " add this data to the data model", can you help to adv how to change the date source in such case?
Is there a way to update the source once you have added to the data model? I receive a new spreadsheet weekly and would like to update the connection so my tables pull from the new source.
Hi Crhis, I like how you have hulk (superhero) as your avatar. Do you know that there is a superhero in Excel too? It's Power Query. You can use it to solve your problem in a simple click. Here an intro if you need some guidance.
Powerful Introduction to Power Query
A big Thank you. It worked.
Hi, have survey data that I need to analyze but the challenge is that my key fields are showing horizontally. I tried to transpose the fields using Power Query, but unfortunately the new fields are returning same values on a pivot table despite using distinct values
How I can a do a pivot table with discount conts in some columns and then generate shor report filter pages. pls it drives crazy
Hi. Why grand total pivot of distinct count is 13? shouldn't it be 67?
Great Answer! Saved me lots of time!
Thank you!!!
Worked awesome! Thanks!!
Hi Chandoo,
I am using pivot tables for distinct count and now I need to update them with new set of data. But when I update the source data, all the columns and formatting of Pivot table disappears and I need to build it from Scratch.
Is there a possibility that I can update the source data with new rows added and also retain my pivot tables?