All articles with 'array formulas' Tag

Lets say you are looking at some data as shown above and wondering what is the sum of budgets for top 3 projects in East region with Low priority. How would you do that with formulas?

Last week, we had our very first quiz – “How well do you know your LOOKUPs?”. I hope you have enjoyed it.

Today lets understand the answers & explanations for this quiz.

Today lets tackle a familiar data clean-up problem using Excel – Transposing data.

That is, we want to take all rows in our data & make them columns. Something like this:

Learn these 4 techniques to transpose data:
1. Using Paste Special > Transpose
2. Using INDEX formula & Helper cells
3. Using INDEX, ROWS & COLUMNS formulas
4. Using TRANSPOSE Formula

Its Friday, that means time for another Excel challenge for you.

Calculate vacation days in a period:

Your mission, if you choose to accept it,

Step 1: Download the hom work problem file.

Step 2: Calculate number of vacations taken in a period. Specifically,

1) How many vacations are taken between start & end dates, assuming complete vacation should be inside the start & end date period?
2) How many vacations are taken such that at least one day of vacation is between start & end dates?
3) How many people took vacations? (if same person took multiple vacations, then count it as 1)

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2013 Excel Calendar Template.

This calender has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

Are you ready for an Excel challenge?

Today, your job is very simple. Just find a pattern in a text and return corresponding value.

Your Homework:

In a range we have some resource types & their billing rates.

In another range, we have some descriptions. Each description contains a resource type somewhere inside it. We need to retrieve billing rate for each description by looking up which resource type is mentioned in it.

See above diagram.

Today lets tackle a very familiar problem. You have a bunch of very long, complicated file names & paths. Your boss wants a list of files extracted from these paths, like below:

Of course nothing is impossible. You just need correct ingredients. I cannot help you with a strong cup of coffee, so go and get it. I will wait…

Back already? well, lets start the formula magic then.

Today at Formula Forensics, Guest author Sajan shows us how to extract a sorted, unique list of items, displaying the most frequently occurring items first, while restricting the output based on some additional criteria.

So who is up for a challenge? Can you use only formulas and extract dates buried inside text?

1. Download this file.
2. In column C, write a formula such that you can extract the date in column B
3. If you succeed, post your solution here as a comment.
4. If you fail, drink some coffee, start afresh.

Whenever we deal with large amounts of data, one of the goals for analysis is, How is this data distributed?

This is where a Box plot can help. According to Wikipedia, a box plot is a convenient way of graphically depicting groups of numerical data through their five-number summaries: the smallest observation (sample minimum), lower quartile (Q1), median (Q2), upper quartile (Q3), and largest observation (sample maximum)

Today, let us learn how to create a box plot using MS Excel. You can also download the example workbook to play with static & interactive versions of box plots.

We know that using VLOOKUP, we can find a value corresponding to a given item. For example Sales of x. But what if you have multiple sales for each item and you want the last value?

Today lets understand how to find the last date of an activity, given data like above.

Like everything else in Excel, there are multiple ways to finding last date. If cats can use computers, they would hate Excel. You see, Excel is overflowing with unlimited ways to skin a cat.

Often we deal with data where numbers are buried inside text and we need to extract them. Today morning I had such task. As you know, we recently ran a survey asking how much salary you make. We had 1800 responses to it so far. I took the data to Excel to analyze it. And surprise! the numbers are a mess. Here is a sample of the data.

As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, I have asked you to share your favorite tips & techniques for speeding up Excel. And what-a-mind-blowing response you gave. 75 of you responded with lots of valuable tips & ideas to speed-up Excel formulas, VBA & Everything else.

Thanks to all the contributors

Many thanks to everyone who shared their tips & ideas with us. If you like the tips, please say thanks to the contributor.

Read Excel Speeding-up tips by area

This page is broken in to 3 parts, click on any link to access those tips.

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We love to compare. The instinct to compare leaves no one. Even my two year old twins compare their toys with each other (and fight).

It would make Excel hugely popular if Microsoft builds a handy data comparison tool right in to it. Alas, they have customizable ribbon, 3d effects & equation editor…

Since comparison is one of the main uses of Excel, we have written extensively about it here.

But there is always one more interesting comparison problem. Today, I want to share one such problem, based on a comment left by N-Man.

Today in Formula Forensics we look at how to Calculate the Maximum value from a list subject to other fields meeting certain criteria: