Now, to calculate the dates in a month that meet this clause, we need an “exclusive OR” formula or what geeks call as “XOR” operation.

Wikipedia defines XOR as,

The logical operation … exclusive or (symbolized XOR, EOR), … results in a value of true if exactly one of the operands has a value of true. A simple way to state this is “one or the other but not both.”

Now, XOR or exclusive Or is a fairly common logical test, but there is no straight forward formula to test this. Instead we have to use a lengthy combination or AND, OR and NOT formulas to arrive at XOR.

For eg. assuming you want TRUE only when one of the two logical conditions A or B is TRUE,

you have to write,

=OR(AND(NOT(A),B),AND(A,NOT(B))) [Afterall, that is how XOR operation is defined to begin with]

Now, that seems like an awful formula. May be there is a better formula after all?!? One that is less crazier than the HR clause of ACME Co.

Well, there is.

If you observe closely, XOR is nothing but <> (not equal to sign). So, instead of going nuts writing the lengthy ANDORNOT combination, you can simplify the formula to,

=A<>B and it gives the same outcome.

So, the formula to find whether a given date (in cell A1) qualifies for bonus allowance,

=IF((WEEKDAY(A1)=6)<>(MOD(DAY(A1),5)=0),"Pay Bonus","Pay Regular")

More about logical formulas in Excel

AND Formula | OR Formula | NOT Formula | 51 common excel formulas

Do you XOR in real life?

There have been few occasions when I had to XOR in my worksheets. I found that writing the correct formula can be a bit tricky depending on how crazy the rule is. But almost always a combination of <>, NOT, AND and OR worked for me well.

What about you? Do you write formulas that involve complex IF clauses?

There are some steps in testing. For each test scenario, a combination of these steps is required. It is my responsibility to identify the steps as well as their combinations for each of the scenarios. So I quickly prepared a table with all the steps in left most column and one scenario each in one column. I put “X” in a cell if the step needs to appear in that scenario. But when I gave it to our testing team, they asked me if the scenarios can be explained a little better. See this picture to understand what they want and what I made.

So I immediately converted the “X”s to actual step names using a simple IF formula. (Copied the table, and wrote ‘if there is an X in the previous table, get the actual step from left most column otherwise empty‘).

Then the problem of actually removing various blank cells. First I tried to select all the blank cells and remove them using our technique from last week. But it failed as the blank cells are actually formulas with empty values. So I copy pasted the entire table as values (CTRL+C, ALT+ESV). But even then excel wont recognize blanks as true blanks (because the value is actually “” instead of being plain empty.)

Now I didnt want to manually select all the blank cells as the real testing scenario table had 50 scenarios with 68 possible steps.

Then it stuck me, why not use FIND (CTRL+F) to find all the cells containing nothing? So I selected the scenario table, opened the find and looked up all the cells that contain empty values. Now I clicked on “Find all” and selected the entire list of values from that. Finally I removed all these cells and bingo!

PS: Our testers was more than happy as it took very little time and they had all the scripts ready.
PPS: Thanks to Rick, who taught me FIND ALL approach to select blank cells (here).

I was wondering how to tabulate large amount of information gathered through surveys. Where I work customers are constantly handed survey sheets in order for us to measure how the service -among other things- is being perceived. Now, to put all that info into a spreadsheet (plus charts) can be really tedious.

So far I manage to get the job done by assigning 1 to 4 values were 1 sucks and 4 is great and so there I go column after column (each column is one individual survey) filling my 1 to 4’s answers. I know there’s an easy version with VBA; problem is that I am a total ignorant in that area. Any suggestions?

Few ideas that would make consolidation easy:

• Make sure all the source files are in the same format: make a template that your colleagues can use to input the data every month. This way you can use 3D references to summarize the data.
• Create a user form so that your audience can enter information in that instead of directly entering it in spreadsheet.
• Find out if the survey or other type data collection can be fed to a database. This way, every month we can import the data using data connections.
• If we actually end up with sheets with different data formats, spend sometime and study the anomalies. Then you can develop a small macro or find-replace routine that would clean the data. [related: clean data using excel]
• Try to save the files as CSV and open them in a regular expression capable editor like Notepad++. Now match and clean up data.
• All else fails, get a strong cup of coffee, put on some music, roll your sleeves and start alt+tabbing.

But more than these ideas, I am interested to know how YOU solve this problem.

I think this is a very common problem. Since I have very little experience in the area of consolidating data from multiple sheets in to one, I couldn’t give her any real advise. So now I am turning to you.

• Do you use any add-ins or macros to consolidate data? What is your experience like, what would you recommend?
• What shortcuts, ideas and cool things you use when working on data from multiple sheets?
• How do you usually clean / normalize the data?

Please discuss.

Of course there is..

To clean up incorrect percentages just follow these 4 steps.

1. Type 100 in an empty cell. Now copy the cell by pressing CTRL+C
2. Select cells with incorrect percentages, and press ALT+E S (alternatively right click and select Paste Special)
3. Now, Select “Divide” from operation area. See it aside.
4. That is all. We have divided all the values in incorrect percentage cells by 100. Make sure the cells are formatted in % style to show 0.23 as 23%.

Bonus: You can remove % signs by multiplying cell values with 100.

Bonus*Bonus: You can convert a bunch of hours to days by dividing them with 24, minutes to hours by dividing with 60 etc.

Bonus ^Bonus: 15 more ways to use Excel’s paste special. Do you know all of them?

Conditional formatting is a very useful feature in Excel. You can use Conditional formatting to tell excel how to format cells that meet certain conditions. For eg. You can use conditional formatting to show all negative values in a range in red color. [Learn conditional formatting basics].

Today we will learn how to use conditional formatting to format dates.

Click on the below links to jump to relevant section.
Excel 2007+ – Conditional Formatting Dates
Excel 2003 – Conditional Formatting Dates

Excel 2007+ – Conditional Formatting Dates

In Excel 2007, MS introduced several useful shortcuts to conditionally format dates. When you select some cells and click on Conditional Formatting button on ribbon and select “Highlight cells Rules” > “A date occurring”, Excel presents you quick shortcuts to frequent date criteria. This list includes options to format,

• A Date if it is yesterday
• Today
• Tomorrow,
• In the last 7 days
• Last week
• This Week
• Next Week
• Last Month
• This Month
• Next Month

Using this feature, you can quickly format the dates in your data meeting certain criteria.

This is very useful in situations where you want to highlight for eg. sales in last week. As the dates change, the highlighted values change dynamically.

Apart from these predefined date conditions, you can define your own conditions using formulas.

Excel 2003 – Conditional Formatting Dates

Unlike Excel 2007, there are no shortcuts for conditional date formatting in Excel 2003. You have to rely on Conditional Formatting Formulas to do this.

What is a conditional formatting formula?
In excel you can use formulas to determine which cells get the special formatting thru conditional formatting. For eg. a formula like =A1>50 applied over the range A1:A10 will highlight the cells with value more than 50.

So, to check if the date in cell A1 is yesterday, you can write a simple formula like,
=TODAY()-A1=1. [help on TODAY formula]

Here are some formulas to get you started,

• To check if a date is in the last 7 days:
  =TODAY()-A1<7
• To check if a date is in the current week:
  =AND(WEEKNUM(A1)=WEEKNUM(TODAY()), YEAR(A1)=YEAR(TODAY()))
• To check if a date is in the current month:
  =AND(MONTH(A1)=MONTH(TODAY()), YEAR(A1)=YEAR(TODAY()))
• To check if a date is in the last 30 days:
  =TODAY()-A1<30

[Help on AND formula, MONTH formula, YEAR formula, IF formula]

Using above formula based conditional formatting you can easily determine if a date meets a given criteria and highlight it.

A Practical Application – Highlighting Repeat Customers

Let us say you run a small retail store. And you want to give special discounts to all the repeat customers. In your mind a repeat customer is someone who bought twice from you in last 30 days. (If the person bought twice but the gap between 2 purchases is more than 30 days they are not repeat customers).

In tomorrow’s post I will show you how to highlight repeat customers using excel conditional formatting. Stay tuned.

Learn more about Excel Conditional Formatting

• Excel conditional formatting basics
• Using formulas in excel conditional formatting – 5 kickass examples
• Highlight Top 10 items in a list – using conditional formatting
• More tutorials on Conditional Formatting, Excel Dates, Excel Date Formulas

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Of course, we can use the print settings in Excel to do this very easily.

In Excel 2003:

It is a bit sneaky in Excel 2003 and earlier, but totally worth it.

Go to Print Settings, and from “page” tab, set the Fit to “1″ pages wide by and leave the tall field blank (if there is a value, just remove it).

In Excel 2007+:

From the Page Layout ribbon tab, set the width to “1 page” and height to “automatic” to print the worksheet in one page across.

In Excel 2010, it is even more simpler as you can use the backstage view to tell excel how you want your sheets to be printed.

More printing tips for excel and bite sized yummy excel tip cookies for you to chew.

While this is not a real mile stone or anything, I want to use this post to say thanks.

Thanks to this blog, I have found passion for working with data.
Thanks to this blog, I am able to share my passion with all of you.
Thanks to this blog, I learn new things almost every day.
Thanks to this blog, I found such lovely audience.
Thanks to this blog, I got so many new friends and mentors.
Thanks to this blog, I am no longer worried about my finances.
Thanks to this blog, I have improved my writing skills.
Thanks to this blog, I have become a better individual.
Thanks to this blog, I wake up with a smile everyday.
Thanks to this blog, I feel connected, compassionate, creative and content.

Thank you PHD.

The next 1000 posts

It may as well take another 5 years before I reach the 2000 post mile stone. But here is what I have in mind for PHD’s future.

• Make more users awesome in Excel and Charting. That means, more tricks, hacks, formulas, charting tutorials.
• Encourage guest posts – If there is one thing I am sure about what I know it is “I know very little”. The blog certainly helps me learn new things everyday, but there is so much to learn and there is so little time. Guest posts are a great way to pick up new ideas and new techniques. You will see a lot more of them in future.
• Have regular polls and contests – I am hoping to launch a poll or contest every month. It is no easy task, but I find the community interaction really good on these types of posts.
• Write few more “series” posts – may be about financial modeling, small business management, better charting etc.
• Start a weekly news letter – Our community has grown tremendously in the last 2 years. Keeping in touch with our members has become a difficult task. A news letter (sent out once every week or two) can be an easy way to send updates and share ideas.
• Improve the forums – The PHD forums have amazing number of discussions on regular basis. My aim is increase the activity on forums by encourage more members to sign up and discuss.
• Have More Videos and Screencasts – It is far more easy to learn by looking someone do it. Thus you will see more videos and screencast based tutorials in future.
• Launch few more ebooks and products – I find that having my own products is the best and most effective way to monetize this blog. Over time I am hoping to get rid of the ads on the blog and rely only on revenues from my products.
• Review and recommend quality excel and charting products – There are several high-quality excel products – from folks like Peltier, Jorge, Stephen Few, Charley Kyd etc. and we all could benefit much by understanding how these products work and how they can help us do more in less time.
• Start Online Excel Training Classes – I have been making the videos and material for offering online excel classes. The course should start sometime next year. It should be exciting to see how this takes off.

It is not post until you get an excel tip. As usual we eat and drink excel tips. So here is one to make this a really useful post.

Format a number to be shown in thousands

To format a number in a cell to be displayed in “thousands”,

• Select the cell, Hit CTRL+1 (or go to “format cells”)
• From the “number” tab, go to “custom” format to specify a custom number formatting code
• Specify the code as #,##0, " thousands"
• Bonus – use #,##0,, " millions" to show numbers in millions
• That is all.

Thank you once again. Without you, this mile stone means nothing to me.

Turns out you can do that with a hidden option in excel page setup.

To print excel comments:

1. Go to Page Layout Ribbon > Click on “Print Titles” button. This opens the Page Setup dialog. (In excel 2003 you can just go to File > Page Setup)
2. You should be in the “Sheet” tab, if not go there.
3. Do you see that sneaky little box called as “comments”? Click on it and select how you want to print comments.
   
4. You can print comments as they are shown or print them at the end in a separate page. The output will look like this:
   

That is all. Now you know the trick to print excel spreadsheet comments.

More on excel comments: change the shape of excel comment box | pimp your comment boxes | extract comments using formulas

Learn more about printing & excel and quick excel tips.

Here is a handy little trick to do just that:

1. Select the axis and press CTRL+1 (or right click and select “Format axis”)
2. Go to “Number” tab. Select “Custom”
3. Specify the custom formatting code as #,##0;-#,##0;;
4. Press “Add” if you are using Excel 2007, otherwise press just OK.
5. That is all.

The trick uses custom number formatting codes in excel to show blanks whenever axis value is Zero, thus hiding the zeros at the bottom of axis. [even more juicy awesome kickass stuff on custom cell formatting]

Learn more quick excel tips and charting tricks.

PS: I am in Stockholm this week, to meet some customers. Internet access is limited plus I am too busy exploring this beautiful city. So we will have only quick tips this week.

Here I have included few examples,

To pick a random date in the last one month:

=TODAY() - RANDBETWEEN(0,30)

or

=TODAY() - RAND()*30

To pick a random date in the next one month:

=TODAY() + RANDBETWEEN(0,30)

or

=TODAY() + RAND()*30

To pick a random date in the last one year:

=TODAY() - RANDBETWEEN(0,365)

or

=TODAY() - RAND()*365

To pic a random time of day:

=RAND()

Make sure you format the cell to show value as date (or time) to see the outcome. Also, if you have not turned on the Analysis toolpak, the RANDBETWEEN formula will not work.

More on picking random stuff:

Random phone number | Shuffle a list | More on Random Formulas

More excel formula tutorials

PS: If you are looking to pick up a random date, what are you doing here?