Late. Jayaram, my uncle is also a teacher. When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time with him, learning all sorts of things. He taught me chess, maths and so many life lessons. I remember one such lesson very vividly. One day, he asked me to do something. I did it in a very long way. After seeing me struggle for several minutes, he chipped in and showed me how to do it easily. He then said, “when someone asks you where your nose is, you don’t twist arm around your head. You just point to your nose directly.”
The idea is that when you have a direct, simple way to do something, you should use it.
Nose and pivot tables… how are they connected?
We are coming to the point. Recently, learneagerly, one of our forum users asked a question about how to transform (reshape) a set of data in Excel.
Marc L, one of our Excel ninjas, posted an awesome VBA script to do that.
Later in the day, I chipped in and shared a formula approach to transform the data.
I suggest checking out both approaches for learning more about VBA & INDEX formula respectively.
After posting my answer, I got thinking… May be there is a more direct way to reshape the data.
Why, yes, there is. You can use Pivot Tables.
Let’s take a look at the data & problem first
Here is a snapshot of raw data and expected output.
As you can see, we have two columns of data and we need to extract n (here it is 6) items from first column, then n from second column and lay them out in output. We repeat this until we run out of the data.
Reshape this thing with a Pivot
The first step is to add two extra columns to your raw data. Let’s call them Running & Repeat.
- Running: with numbers 1 thru 6 and repeat the pattern (just auto fill or copy paste)
- Repeat: with 6 cells of 1, 6 cells of 2… and repeat this pattern (auto-fill)
But what if I want a different n
Even better. use formulas. Let’s say your data starts from H6:I6
- Running: =MOD(ROWS($I$6:I6)-1,n)+1
- Repeat: =IF(J6=1,SUM(K5,1),K5)
Related: Using ROWS() to generate running numbers in Excel.
Now that we have these extra columns, select all the data (2 columns of data + 2 extra columns we just added) and insert a pivot table.
Set up the report by,
- Adding Repeat & Running to row labels area (in that order)
- Add Col A & Col B to values area.
- Move the ? values to row labels area (by dragging it)
- Position ? values between Repeat & Running row labels.
- Your pivot report’s last column will have the transformed data.
- Viola, nose pointed!
Download Example Workbook
Here is the example workbook. Examine the pivot table & formulas in Running & Repeat columns to learn more.
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How do you reshape your data?
Pivot Tables and Power Query are my go to tools for almost all kinds of reshaping problems. Often, I indulge in INDEX formulas or a bit of VBA. For example, just a few days ago, I had to split first 100,000 digits of Pi ? in chunks of 3 digits, 3 digits and 14 digits in a pattern. As the data is too long, loading it Excel cell was impractical. Loading it in to multiple lines with each having x digits was impractical (as I may need to split them in another pattern). So I used a simple VBA script to zap the data and get what I need.
In case you are curious: I made a chart to celebrate the Pi day (14th of March) with our community on Twitter.
But when I am not splitting irrational stuff, I usually rely on Pivot tables or PQ.
What about you? How do you reshape your data? Please share your approaches and tips in the comments section.
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.