All articles with 'sorting' Tag

Last week, we had a lovely poll on what are your favorite features of Excel? More than 120 people responded to it with various answers. So I did what any data analyst worth his salt would do,

I analyzed the data and here are the top 10 features in Excel according to you.

Read on to learn more.

It is Olympic season. Everyone I know is tracking the games and checking their country’s performance. One thing that we notice when looking at medal tally is,

A single Gold medal is worth more than any number of Silver medals. Like wise, a single Silver medal is worth more than any number of Bronze medals.

So, when you look at the ranking of countries, you see countries with single Gold medal higher up than countries with lots of Silver and Bronze medals (but no Gold).

Ever looked at a Pivot table & wondered how you can sort it differently?

“If only I could show this report of monthly sales such that our best months are on top!”

Well, there is a way to do it without sacrificing 2 goats or pleasing the office Excel god. Just use custom sorting options in Pivot tables.

Excel formulas acting slow? As part of our Speedy Spreadsheet Week, today lets talk about optimizing & speeding up Excel formulas. Use these tips & ideas to super-charge your sluggish workbook. Use the best practices & formula guidelines described in this post to optimize your complex worksheet models & make them faster.

1. Use tables to hold the data
2. Use named ranges & named formulas
3. Use pivot tables
4. Sort your data
5. Use manual calculation mode

… and more. Read on to learn these top 10 tips & ideas to improve performance of your excel formulas.

Today, we will learn an interesting array formula trick to test if a list is sorted or not. During last one week, I got 2 requests from different clients for some excel related work. Both of them had one thing in common. To test whether a list is sorted or not. So I got thinking, [...]

We are busy decorating the Christmas tree, making preparations for the holidays. But I have a very quick tip for you.

[Note: all these tips work in Excel 2007 or above]

Whenever you are working with huge lists of data, filtering & sorting is one simple way to analyze the data quickly.

You can quickly filter your data based on current cell’s value by right clicking and then selecting filter > filter by selected cell’s value.

A good dashboard must show important information at a glance and provide option to drill down for details.

Showing Top 10 (or bottom 10) lists in a dashboard is a good way to achieve this (see aside). Today we will learn an interesting technique to do this in Excel.

Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.

What is an excel table?

Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”

The other day I was watching Formula 1 on TV. I think it is the ideal game to follow for a lazy dude like me. It is on every other weekend. It takes .32 seconds to understand the game and 3.2 seconds to know the points and scoring mechanism. But I am not here to convince you to follow the game. While looking at score boards, it struck me,

“how about writing excel formulas for sorting a list of durations (or numbers) in the formula 1 order?”

Cheryl asks via e-mail, “I was wondering if you could help me figure out how to combine the round formula with the rank formula? I need to first round all the numbers and then rank them.”

Of course we can solve this by simply using array formulas. Curious? Find out more by reading the rest of this post.

Sorting text is such a day to day activity that it always surprises me why Excel hasn’t provided a simple spreadsheet formula for doing it. Of course you can use the sorting menu command (menu > data > sort) but this requires manual steps (or VBA). Most of the times we get raw textual data [...]

In shuffling a list of items in excel I have described the technique of using random numbers generated by RAND() to sort a list of items. The technique had one disadvantage though, every time you need to reshuffle the list you have to press F9 to recalculate the rand() and then go to menu > [...]

Here is a quick Monday tip for data junkies. If you want to shuffle a list of numbers or cells in excel in random order you can do that with “data > sort” menu option of excel. First insert a column next to the list you want to shuffle and enter random numbers in each [...]

change-sort-orientation-excel-columns You can sort data across columns instead of rows by changing sort options. If you ever had to sort across columns now you know a simple way to do this Follow these steps for changing sort orientation: Select the table you want to sort (just the data, not the headers as when you change [...]