A few weeks back in the Chandoo.org Forum Melvin asked about Apportioning Sales based on Division and Status to the current sales by store.
Today we will examine how this works and how to develop a solution for the problem.
Apportion/ing
Apportion means to assign or distribute.
In a court the Judge may apportion blame for an accident eg: 50% to the driver, 30% to mechanical failure and 20% to the road conditions, The Judge is assigning or distributing the blame as he deams appropriate.
This is what Melvin wanted to do with his sales. He wanted the sales distributed according to Division and Status based on the current sale by store.
Lets start simple and look at how we can distribute sales on a simple model first.
Let say we have a Distributorship and we buy and sell oranges.
We buy oranges from a supplier and distribute them to 3 stores, Store A, Store B & Store C
We received 1,000 oranges and they were sold as follows
We can see that each store received differing percentages of the original supply:
50% = 500/1000
30% = 300/1000
etc
A week later the supplier give us another 200 oranges and we want to distribute them based on the previous sales
So the new batch of 200 oranges will be distributed according to these previous percentages
100 = 200 x 50%
60 = 200 x 30%
etc
That is as simple and as complicated as apportioning is.
Melvin’s Problem
When we look at Melvin’s problem he has a more complex set of data
You can follow along using a sample file: Download Sample File
We can see that Melvin has 14 stores located in 4 Divisions (N, S, W & C) and each can have a status of Open or Open1
But if we simplify this and look at one set of data we can devise a formula which will adjust to each set of data
Lets develop a formula for cell F11 which is dealing with Store 1 in the N Division and has a Status of Open
We see it has sales of 100 (Cell E11)
Total sales of Division N and status Open are 600 (100+100+100+150+150) highlighted below (Lower table)
Looking at the Upper Table we can see that we need to distribute 200 units based on the Division N and Status Open (Cell C4)
So we need to distribute 200 units across the 5 stores with Total sales of 600
We know that Store 1. had sales of 100 in cell E11
The Total Sales of Stores in Division N and Status Open can be obtained using a Sumifs function
=SUMIFS($E$11:$E$24, C11:$C$24, $C$11, $D$11:$D$24, D11)
=600
So the proportion of Store 1’s sales 100 to Total Sales ( Division N and Status Open ) 600 is 100/600 = 16.66%
This is calculated by
=E11/SUMIFS($E$11:$E$24, $C$11:$C$24, C11, $D$11:$D$24, D11)
=0.1667
=16.67%
Note: We leave the references to C11, D11 & E11 variable, so that when the formula is copied down it will refer to the next row
We can use an index/match formula to get the 200 based on the criteria from row 11
=INDEX($C$4:$D$7, MATCH(D11,$B$4:$B$7,0), MATCH(C11,$C$3:$D$3,0))
What this is doing is doing a 2D Lookup in the Range $C$4:$D$7
It is looking up the Division Row no. MATCH(D11,$B$4:$B$7,0)
and looking in the Status Column No. MATCH(C11,$C$3:$D$3,0)
Note: Once again we leave the references to C11 & D11 variable, so that when the formula is copied down it will refer to the next row
So the proportion of the 200 sales attributable to Store 1 is:
=Distribution Qty * Actual Sales / Total Sales
=INDEX($C$4:$D$7, MATCH(D11, $B$4:$B$7, 0), MATCH(C11, $C$3:$D$3, 0)) * E11 / SUMIFS($E$11:$E$24, $C$11:$C$24, C11, $D$11:$D$24, D11)
= 33.33
We can now copy this down to all the cells matching our criteria of Division N and Status Open
Notice that the total matches the total to be distributed 200 showing that the formula is working
Although we copied the formula down to the cells that had matching criteria each part of the formula was setup to work on the appropriate criteria for the store in the current row
If we now copy F11 down to the other stores you will see that in fact all the stores sales have been apportioned according to the correct criteria.
eg: If we look at Stores 7, 8 & 9 we can see that they are in the W Division and have a Status of Open1
The distributed Proportions are each 16.67, totaling 50, which matches the distribution in the Upper table.
You may also notice that Division C has not been accounted for.
I assume that Melvin has sent us a subset of the data and that is why it is missing.
Download
You can download a copy of the above file and follow along, Download Sample File.
A Challenge
Can you solve the problem another way ?
Post your solutions in the comments below.
Other Posts in this Series
The Formula Forensics Series contains a wealth of useful solutions and information specifically about how Normal Formula and specifically Array Formula work.
You can learn more about how to pull Excel Formulas apart in the following posts: http://chandoo.org/wp/formula-forensics-homepage/
If you have a formula and you want to understand how it works contact Hui and it may be featured in future posts.
30 Responses to “Rescue oddly shaped data – Battle between Formulas, VBA and Power Query”
Nice use of Power Query! Power Query is simply awesome! But somehow a lot of people are punishing themselves by not using it (not learning it).
An imperfect 4th approach for consideration... no codes at all...
Select myrange.
Go to Special --> Blank
Delete Cell --> Shift cell left
90% done... now we just need to move the data of 2nd column to the bottom of 1st column
Of course... Power Query is the best.
Cheers,
There is another way but it involves multiple steps:
Copy the values in column E, move the cursor to F5, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
Copy the values in column D, move the cursor to F8, Paste Special with Skip Blanks, OK
And so on.
This works perfectly, albeit a little clumsily apart from the values in B17 and C16, which can be moved with simple copy and paste
Power Query Forever! I do not know how I survived for so long without knowing and using this tool, I can not recommend it to my colleagues, but by the way they prefer to suffer to learn.
My congratulations here from Brazil.
I rolled my eyes when I saw that data
Using decimal places is a nice trick to order data, thanks for that
And tweaking the first formula a bit, you can use OFFSET instead of INDIRECT
=OFFSET($A$1, MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange)), ROWS(A$1:A1))-1, RIGHT(TEXT(MIN(IF(myrange, ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001), ROWS(A$1:A1)), ".00000"), 5)-1)
Tried the above formula with the downloaded oddly shaped data file and I could not get it to work. I get #value without ctrl+shift+enter, and #ref with ctrl+shift+enter.
Sorry, it was SMALL, not MIN.
Add with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER.
Thank you for your formula. Like the indirect formula I tested this one in older versions of EXCEL and it worked without ALTERATION in EXCEL 95. Very impressive.
Too complicated
Use =Sum to summarize all the sells to the left and Bobs Your Uncle
@Bertie... I am afraid that won't work when you have more than one value in a row.
I tested this formula in versions of Excel all the way back to Excel 95
=IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(MyRange"",ROW(MyRange)+COLUMN(MyRange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A9)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
So there are multiple ways of cleaning up messy data by formulas.
Wow.. Excel 95. Who knew people still use that. But as you have shown, Excel has all these beautiful and powerful functions for 23 years. It has data sciency stuff before DS was even a thing.
I had a problem with pasting the formula in the original post.
Formula should be: =IF(ISERROR(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)),"",(INDIRECT("R"&SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange"",ROW(myrange)+COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),ROWS(A$1:A1)),"00000.00000"),".","C"),FALSE)))
EXCEL even in a 16 bit version, is a very robust and capable program.
I don't like the VBA code. If you have a blank row in MyRange, the last entry in the range is doubled up in the paste.here range.
Not really. The macro is writing one cell at a time from paste.here. You have to clean the range before, which I was too lazy to write. But a line like Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents should do the trick.
Adding Range(range("paste.here"), range("paste.here").end(xldown)).clearcontents fixed the problem.
for step split column by delimiter i am not getting option of split into rows or columns. Can you help me in this
Thanks Chandoo for promoting Power Query.
To simplify further, you can "Unpivot Columns" instead of right click on the newly created column and split it by comma in to rows in step 3 of Power Query.
i used
=LOOKUP(10000,B5:F5)
and got the answers. I just plagiarized this formula somewhere and use it, maybe you can explain why it works.
Regards
@Johan... I am not sure if the formula works correctly. When I tested it with the sample data in this post, it showed #N/As in two cells. Essentially, it will only give first value in each row. So if a row has multiple values, then subsequent values are missed. LOOKUP() function goes thru a list and finds the first value that is less than or equal to the input - in this case 10000 in B5:F5.
I have the need to convert pdf's to excel on occasion and they often come out a mess like this. I have used:
Cell G2 =COUNT(myrange)
Cell G3 =IFERROR(IF(G2-1<1,"",G2-1),"") copied down to G100
Cell H2 =IFERROR(LARGE(myrange,G2),"") copied down to H100
Waouw...
=IFERROR(INDIRECT("R" & SUBSTITUTE(TEXT(SMALL(IF(myrange "", ROW(myrange) + COLUMN(myrange)*0.00001),
ROWS(A$1:A1)), "00000.00000"), ".", "C"), FALSE), "")
but CTRL Shift Enter with {} before and after 🙂 😀
Here's a way with pivot table
https://www.bookkempt.com/2018/02/aligning-non-contiguous-data.html
This is brilliant. Bookmarked 🙂
Another possibility.
This assumes that you have a row index 'k' to use in the SMALL function and a column index 'h' to identify the columns of 'myRange'.
If you define 'coord' to refer to
=k+h/10 [assuming h<10]
then it will be possible to recover values later based upon location within 'myRange'. The formula 'nb' that identifies non-blanks by coordinates is given by
= SMALL( IF(myRange"", coord), k )
Finally, to unpick the pieces
= INDEX( myRange, INT(nb), 10*MOD(nb, 1) )
Whilst I am here and making trouble the PQ solution is also a tad over-complicated. All that is needed is to unpivot the entire table and remove the Attribute column.
The advanced editor would show
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myRange"]}[Content],
#"Unpivoted Columns" = Table.UnpivotOtherColumns(Source, {}, "Attribute", "Value"),
#"Removed Columns" = Table.RemoveColumns(#"Unpivoted Columns",{"Attribute"})
in
#"Removed Columns"
1.fill the blank cells with 0
2.the requested column value=sum of those mess number column
but this can be used in only one column has value
Chandoo
And if we use the formula SEARCH (100000000, B5: F5)
JC
Another approach with Power Query, it will still work if the number of columns changed:
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="myrange"]}[Content],
#"Added Custom" = Table.AddColumn(Source, "List", each Record.ToList(_)),
#"Removed Other Columns" = Table.SelectColumns(#"Added Custom",{"List"}),
#"Expanded LIst" = Table.ExpandListColumn(#"Removed Other Columns", "List"),
#"Filtered Rows" = Table.SelectRows(#"Expanded LIst", each ([List] null))
in
#"Filtered Rows"
Cool idea to use Record.ToList as added column. Thanks for sharing this.
Nowadays, you can just use TOCOL on Excel 2024, MS 365, and Web Excel. It has a parameter to ignore blanks/errors/both.