Or more appropriately titled, the one where Power Query solves the problem in less time than it takes you to say Get & Transform Data.
Recently, one of my students Mr. K, sent me a pivot table problem.
Today my boss asked me “how much we paid to staff since the inception of our business with their respective date of joining?” He wanted to know, level wise summary of the last 16 years (on Quarterly / Year wise basis).
The records appended from the database month wise. Have a look to the file and give your ideas.
Mr. K’s data looked like this.
and his boss wanted a report like this:
What now?
The obvious solution – VLOOKUPs and patience
Even before I could go thru Mr. K’s problem and reply to him, he wrote back to me saying that he found the solution.
He used what I call as VLOOKUP and patience method. First he unpivoted original data using 233,000+ VLOOKUPs . Then he created a new pivot table from this unpivoted data to answer his boss’s questions.
While this method is fine, it consumes a lot of time and coffee.
A better solution – Power Query and pop corn
We, humans are not evolved to write two hundred thousand VLOOKUPs in afternoons. We are better at building powerful machines, watch them do bad ass work while we chew delicious pop corn.
So why not let the computer solve the problem?
Here is the ridiculously simple four step tutorial to get the same results.
- Load the data in to Power Query using From Table feature.
- Unpivot all the monthly data columns
- Load the data in to Excel as a new table
- Pivot it to create the report we need.
All this takes less than 15 seconds. Whenever you have new data, simply refresh the connection and everything (PQ, Pivot tables) gets updated.
Download the example workbook
Here is the workbook just in case you need to see everything. Please use Excel 2013 or above to play with this.
More power to you
Power Query is a truly remarkable feature of Excel. It saves you a lot of time and hassle. If you are new to Power Query (also known as Get & Transform data in Excel 2016), check out below tutorials to get started.
- Introduction to Power Query
- Import and work with web data using PQ
- Unpivot data with Power Query – an example
How would you solve this?
Prior to Power Query, I would have used VBA (as there is a lot of data) for something like this. For smaller data sets, I would have used VLOOKUPs.
What about you? What method would you use to rearrange data like this? Please share your tips in the comments section.
12 Responses to “Analyzing Search Keywords using Excel : Array Formulas in Real Life”
Very interesting Chandoo, as always. Personally I find endless uses for formulae such as {=sum(if(B$2:B$5=$A2,$C$2$C$5))}, just the flexibility in absolute and relative relative referencing and multiple conditions gives it the edge over dsum and others methods.
I've added to my blog a piece on SQL in VBA that I think might be of interest to you http://aviatormonkey.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/lesson-one-sql-in-vba/ . It's a bit techie, but I think you might like it.
Keep up the good work, aviatormonkey
Hi Chandoo,
You might find this coded solution I posted on a forum interesting.
http://www.excelforum.com/excel-programming/680810-create-tag-cloud-in-vba-possible.html
[...] under certain circumstances. One of the tips involved arranging search keywords in excel using Array Forumlas. Basically, if you need to know how frequent a word or group of keywords appear, you can use this [...]
@Aviatormonkey: Thanks for sharing the url. I found it a bit technical.. but very interesting.
@Andy: Looks like Jarad, the person who emailed me this problem has posted the same in excelforum too. Very good solution btw...
Realy great article
"You can take this basic model and extend it to include parameters like number of searches each key phrase has, how long the users stay on the site etc. to enhance the way tag cloud is generated and colored."
How would you go about doing this? I think it would need some VB
Hi,
I found the usage very interesting, but is giving me hard time because the LENs formula that use ranges are not considering the full range, in other words, the LEN formula is only bringing results from the respective "line" cell.
Using the example, when I place the formula to calculate the frequency for "windows" brings me only 1 result, not 11 as displayed in the example. It seems that the LEN formula using ranges is considering the respective line within the range, not the full range.
Any hint?
@Thiago
You have to enter the formula as an Array Formula
Enter the Formula and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter
Not just Enter
Thank you, Hui! I couldn't work out how this didn't work
is there a limit to the number of lines it can analyse.
Ie i am trying to get this to work on a list of sentances 1500 long.
@Gary
In Excel 2010/2013 Excel is only limited by available memory,
So just give it a go
As always try on a copy of the file first if you have any doubts
Apologies if I am missing something, but coudn't getting frequency be easier with Countif formula. Something like this - COUNTIF(Range with text,"*"&_cell with keyword_&"*")
Apologies if I missed, but what is the Array Formula to:
1. Analyze a list of URL's or a list of word phrases to understand frequency;
2. List in a nearby column from most used words to least used words;
3. Next to the list of words the count of occurrences.