Let’s say you are the people manager at ACME Inc. You are looking staff list for the months – January and February 2017. You see that we had 4,000 employees in Jan and 4,200 employees in Feb. So what is the churn?
- Is it just 200?
- Or is it the sum of people who left and who joined?
- What if you want to find out how many people moved to new designations / departments or groups?
You see, churn is tricky to figure out.
So why not invite the pros? ie Power Query.
Side note: You could also calculate churn in Excel (using formulas) or in SQL (by using long queries and unions with a boat load of joins)
Setting up your data – Churn analysis
The first step is to set up two sets of data (one for each point in time). Make sure that you include only relevant columns. Let’s say we go with below layout.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s call these tables thismonth and lastmonth. You can include the data date columns, but they are not necessary for the analysis.
Define churn
We can categorize churn in to one of these 6 levels.
- New employees
- Exits
- People who moved to a new group
- People who moved to a new branch
- People who moved to a new designation
- No changes
Figuring out the churn – Power Query
Here is the process to calculate the churn using Power Query.
- We create a third query by merging two datasets (thismonth and lastmonth) on employee number as Full Outer join (think of this as A union B in sets – ie any employee present in either months will be included)
- We define a custom column in this new query, called status. It will have
- New employees if emp number is null in last month’s column
- Exit if emp number is null in this month’s column
- New group if thismonth.group <> lastmonth.group
- New Branch if thismonth.branch <> lastmonth.branch
- New Designation if thismonth.designation <> lastmonth.designation
- No changes else
- We delete all rows with no changes (as we are only interested in churn)
- Load this data to Excel
Figuring out employee churn – Power Query lesson video
Since the process is somewhat technical and confusing, I made a video explaining everything in detail. Check it out below.
You can watch this video on our youtube channel too.
Download Example Workbook
Click here to download example workbook. You must have Power Query 2013 or Excel 2016 to customize anything.
More on Power Query
Power Query is awesome. If you haven’t explored its power, check out below tutorials and get started.
- Introduction to Power Query
- Unpivot data quickly with Power Query
- How to import web data to Excel using Power Query
- Recommended training: Power Query by Ken Puls
How do you calculate churn?
As mentioned earlier, we can use either Excel formulas or SQL to calculate churn. If I am only interested in high-level churn (ie entries and exits), I use a simple formula. But for anything more than that, I prefer Power Query or SQL (as PQ is not be available in all versions of Excel)
What about you? How do you calculate and analyze churn? Please share your approach and tips in the comments.
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?