First a quick personal update: There has been a magnitude 7.8 earth quake in NZ on 14th November 2016 early morning. It is centered in Kaikoura, which is about 250 km away from Wellington. We did feel several shakes and after shocks. It has been an interesting and often scary experience. But my family is safe. I feel very sad for the all the damage and the loss for families in NZ. If you suffered from this quake, My prayers and thoughts are with you.
Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question. He has school distance data, like below. He wants to know which is the closest school for each school.
There are a few ways to answer this question. Let’s examine two approaches – formulas & pivot tables and see the merits of both.
Formulas to find closest school
All the distance data is in a table named dist.
Assuming you have school names & types in cells H5, I5, we want to find out the closest school of any type and same type in adjacent columns, as shown below.
Let’s take a look at the formulas first. All of these are array formulas. So press CTRL+Shift+Enter after typing.
- J5: Closest School Distance (Any type): =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,dist[Distance]))
- K5: Closest School Name (Any type): =INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&J5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
- L5: Closest School Distance (Same type): =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,IF(dist[To Type]=I5,dist[Distance])))
- M5: Closest School Name (Same type): =INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&L5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
How do these formulas work?
Let’s examine them one at a time.
Closest School Distance (Any type)
Formula: =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,dist[Distance]))
How it works:
- We check if From school is same as the one in H5 and get the corresponding distances only.
- This will return a bunch of distances and FALSE values. Distances will be listed only for the schools that match H5, for all others, the IF() gives FALSE.
- We then pass this list to MIN formula to find the minimum distance.
As we are using arrays inside IF formula, we must press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
Related: Learn more about MAXIF & MINIF formulas.
Closest School Distance (Same type)
Formula: =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,IF(dist[To Type]=I5,dist[Distance])))
How it works:
- We check if From school is same as the one in H5 and if the [To Type] is same as I5 and get the corresponding distances only.
- This will return a bunch of distances and FALSE values. Distances will be listed only for the schools that match H5 and of type I5, for all others, the IF() gives FALSE.
- We then pass this list to MIN formula to find the minimum distance.
Finding the corresponding school name:
Once we know the minimum school distance, we just use array MATCH to find corresponding school number and get the name of the school with an INDEX().
=INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&J5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
As we are concatenating two lists in the MATCH formula, we need to press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
We use same logic to fetch school name for the distance in column L too.
Related: Learn about multi-condition lookups
Formula approach – comments
While the formula approach gives answers we want, it is very tricky to write these formulas. The MIN(IF(…)) structure is not easy to master.
As the formulas check entire data, they can be very slow on large sets.
Pivot table to find closest school
First create a pivot table from the dist table with below settings:
- Add From and From type to row labels area
- Add To and To type to column labels area
- Add distance to values area, summarize it by SUM
- Remove sub totals & grand totals
- Set up pivot in tabular layout
We get this.
At this stage, finding closest school gets easy. We simply use SMALL formula on each pivot table row to find 2nd smallest value (because smallest value is 0 and we should ignore it.) to get the distance. Finding school name is a simple matter of using INDEX + MATCH.
Of course, finding the distance for closest school of same type still requires using array version of SMALL with SMALL(IF(…)) structure. But this formula would be significantly faster as we don’t process all the 10000 rows of data.
Comments on Pivot Table approach
Pivot table approach simplifies the problem and helps us answer the questions faster. You can also apply conditional formatting on top of Pivot Table to instantly highlight closest school(s).
Download example workbook
Click here to download the closest school example workbook. Play with the formulas & pivot table to learn more. Examine the conditional formatting rules for some cool techniques.
How would you find the closest school?
By asking your neighbors, of course. Jokes aside, how would you find the closest school for a given school? Would you use formulas or pivot tables or some other approach? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Need to learn, here is your closest school
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24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA