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.
8 Responses to “Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts”
As far as I remember (checked, again, 2 minutes ago) in my "Excel 2013" in order to select various chart elements I need to use the Arrow keys and not the TAB key.
Practically, the TAB key does nothing (within a Chart).
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Michael (Micky) Avidan
Thanks for pointing this out. This is how I remember it too, but when I was recording the video yesterday, only TAB key worked. MS must have changed the keys in Excel 2016. I have edited the post to include both keys.
The key navigation on charts is different in 2016.
TAB cycles through a layer of objects (SHIFT+TAB cycles backwards)
ENTER move down a layer
ESC moves up a layer
So on a column chart with title/legend/data labels if you select the plotarea the TAB will go through Title > Legend > Plotarea.
ENTER at plotarea will then select Vertical axis. Tab will take you through
Horizontal axis > gridlines > Series > Horizontal Axis.
ENTER with series selected will then allow you to TAB through individual data points and data labels.
If you ENTER on datalabels you can TAB through each data label.
ALT + F1 : to create default chart
ALT+E S T = CTRL + ALT + V, T : I find that easier to remember
I second what Michael already said about TAB and arrow keys. I can't help but think if this is related to the "," or ";" as separator. I prefer to use the chart tools - layout- drop down box, anyway.
Got to be F11 for instant charting. Highlight your data , hit F11 and voila! ?
Ctrl+1 is the most important chart shortcut. In fact, it works for any Excel object: whatever is selected, Ctrl+1 opens the task pane or dialog to format that object.
Somewhere along the line, maybe when Excel 2016 came out, the arrow keys stopped working to cycle through the elements of a chart. But what works is holding Ctrl while clicking the arrow keys. I haven't gotten used to the Tab and other keys, but as long as Ctrl+Arrow works, I'm good.
And F4 used to be so helpful when formatting a lot of charts. But since Excel 2007 came out, it has been mostly useless. It used to remember a whole set of changes at once, so I get that the newer modeless dialogs make that impractical. But now it only seems to work with formatting of lines and borders, and maybe fills. I find myself writing a lot of VBA one-liners in the Immediate Window to handle these tedious formatting tasks.
after clicking on a chart, is there a shortcut key to copy it?
Thank you for the Alt E S T - tip. This is more than a time saver. Because of dynamic charts or de-activated external references to data when you make the charts, you often have empty charts that are otherwise impossible to format. So this shortcut helps adressing that. I will work with it more and see if there remain some obstacles.