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All articles with 'vlookup' Tag

Lookup most frequent item [Homework]

Published on Feb 17, 2017 in Excel Challenges
Lookup most frequent item [Homework]

Here is an interesting problem to keep your brain cells fight boredom on this Friday & weekend.

Let’s say you have some data like above.

And you want to know, for a given customer name (in cell G4),

  • What is the most frequent quantity?
  • What is the most often purchased item?

How would you write formulas to get these answers?

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Designing awesome financial metrics dashboard [tutorial]

Designing awesome financial metrics dashboard [tutorial]

In this amazing guest post, the winner of our 2016 dashboard contest – Chandeep – Explains how he constructed the jaw dropping beauty (shown above) using Excel, creativity, love and sweat. Grab a full cup of coffee (or whatever liquid fancies you) and read on. Take lots of notes and play with the ideas in Excel while reading to maximize your learning.

Thanks Chandeep.

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An odd lookup problem [Formulas]

Published on Dec 6, 2016 in Excel Challenges, Learn Excel
An odd lookup problem [Formulas]

Let’s say you have some employee data in employee name, manager name format. But the data is all in one column, with odd rows containing employee names & even rows containing manager names. Something like above.

And you want to find out who is the boss for a given employee. Say, “Andrea Nichols”.

Your regular MATCH() formula for Andrea over the data range returns wrong answer as it will find first occurrence of Andrea (which in this case happens to be on even row, hence a manager record).

So how would you write the lookup formula?

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Visualizing target vs. actual progress – Biker on a hill chart

Visualizing target vs. actual progress – Biker on a hill chart

Over the years, we have discussed a whole heap of techniques to visualize budget vs. actual charts. Today let’s take a ride on this slope again and learn another fun, silly & awesome way to depict target vs. actual progress.

Introducing biker on a hill chart

Tada!!!

Biker on a hill!?! Don’t worry, I didn’t fall down on a descent and lose my brain. I am talking about an Excel chart to visualize target vs. actual progress on a time line with biker on a hill analogy. See the above chart, you will know.

Looks interesting? Read on to learn how to create this in Excel.

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Analyzing 300,000 calls for help [case study]

Published on Aug 24, 2016 in Analytics, Learn Excel, Pivot Tables & Charts, Power Pivot
Analyzing 300,000 calls for help [case study]

Over the weekend, I got an email from Mr. E, one of my students. Mr. E works at a police department in California and as part of his work, he was looking at calls received by police. Whenever police get a call for help, multiple teams can respond to the call and go to the location. All of these dispatches are recorded. So a single call can have several such dispatches. And Mr. E wanted to findout which team responded the first. The problem?

Finding the first responded team is tricky.

Today let’s take up this problem as a case study and understand various methods to solve it.  We are going to learn about writing better lookups, pivot tables, power pivot and optimization. Put on your helmets, cause this is going to be mind blowingly awesome.

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Generating sequence numbers from cluster values [VLOOKUP to the rescue]

Published on Jun 2, 2016 in Excel Howtos
Generating sequence numbers from cluster values [VLOOKUP to the rescue]

Last night I got an email from Joshua, one of our readers with the subject – Hard Excel problem. Hard?!?, at this stage of summer, the hard problems seem to be (in no particular order),

  1. Lack of good quality mangoes to eat
  2. Intense heat and humidity
  3. Lack of good quality mangoes to eat

Yes, I like mangoes.

Any how, back to Joshua’s email, So I got curios and read it. He is facing a curious problem.

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Not so wild lookups [video]

Published on Feb 12, 2016 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
Not so wild lookups [video]

In case, this is the first time you are hearing about Excel formula wildcards, check out the Using wildcards in Excel VLOOKUP formula tutorial.

So you know about wild cards like * ?, now how would you tell VLOOKUP to ignore them?

Say, you are genuinely interested in looking the value “* Payroll” in a lookup table. What then?

This is exactly the problem faced by Peter in our forum post VLOOKUP and cells with “*” NOT to be interpreted as wildcard

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CP051: VLOOKUP FAQs – Most frequently asked questions about VLOOKUP – Answered

Published on Jan 7, 2016 in Chandoo.org Podcast Sessions
CP051: VLOOKUP FAQs – Most frequently asked questions about VLOOKUP – Answered

In the 51st session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s discuss most frequently asked questions about VLOOKUP.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

  • What is VLOOKUP?
  • What happens when VLOOKUP can’t find the value?
  • Should my list be sorted?
  • Is VLOOKUP slower than INDEX + MATCH?
  • What if my list has multiple matches?
  • How to fetch 2nd / 3rd matching item?
  • How to fetch all matching items?
  • How to fetch items matching multiple conditions?
  • How to speed up VLOOKUP?
  • Why doesn’t my VLOOKUP work?
  • What to do in case of errors?
  • Resources for you
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Pricing Tier Lookup formula

Published on Dec 1, 2015 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
Pricing Tier Lookup formula

Here is an interesting twist on the good old VLOOKUP. How to find the pricing applicable for given quantity of a product?

Something like above.

Looks interesting? Then read on…

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Case Sensitive Lookups

Published on Sep 7, 2015 in Excel Howtos
Case Sensitive Lookups

We all know that VLOOKUP (and its cousins MATCH, HLOOKUP and LOOKUP) are great for finding information you want. But they are helpless when you want to do a case-sensitive lookup.

So how do we write case sensitive VLOOKUP formulas?

Simple. We can use EXACT formula.

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Monthly Planner Template [downloads]

Published on Aug 28, 2015 in Templates
Monthly Planner Template [downloads]

Here is an awesome planner template to help you manage activities over a month. It is useful for charity drives, activity planning, school schedules, marketing initiatives, project planning etc.

Read on to download a copy of the template & learn how to use it.

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VLOOKUP the last value

Published on Aug 11, 2015 in Excel Howtos, Learn Excel
VLOOKUP the last value

VLOOKUP is one of the most useful Excel functions. So much so that I even wrote a book about it. But it has one serious limitation.

It looks up the first occurrence and returns corresponding data.

What if you want to find the last value?

Say, for example, you are looking at a task assignment list and want to know what is the last task assigned to employee Emp13?

We want to extract the task “Make amazing workbook”. Of course our good old VLOOKUP stops once it finds Emp13 and returns the answer as “Create intuitive workbook”.

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Narrating the story of change using Excel charts – case study

market-share-changes-over-time

Here are three questions you often hear from your boss:

  1. What changes are happening in our business and how do they look?
  2. Do you know how to operate this new coffee machine?
  3. Why does every list has 3 items?

Jokes aside, our urge to find change in environment predates cave drawing, slice bread and Tommy Lee Jones. So, today let’s examine a very effective chart that tells the story of change and re-create it in Excel.

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Excel to the Next Level by Mastering Multiple Occurrences

Published on Dec 9, 2014 in Learn Excel
Excel to the Next Level by Mastering Multiple Occurrences

This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar.

August 29, 1994. A day that changed my life forever. Football World Cup? Russia and China de-targeting nuclear weapons against each other? Anniversary of the Woodstock festival?

No, much bigger: Two Undertakers show up at WWE Summerslam for an epic battle. Needless to say: MIND() = BLOWN().

And thus begun one boy’s journey into understanding the phenomenon of Multiple Occurrences.

My journey continued, when just a few years later my grandfather handed me down a precious family heirloom: A few columns of meaningless data that I could take away and analyze in Excel. You may laugh but in the 90’s, every boy only wanted two things 1) Lists of pointless data and …

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Looking up when the data won’t co-operate (case study)

Published on Nov 4, 2014 in Excel Challenges, Excel Howtos
Looking up when the data won’t co-operate (case study)

Occasionally we deal with data that is so uncooperative that we might as well give up and go back to calculators & ledger books.

Recently I found myself in such a situation and learned something new.

Introducing … data that won’t play nice

Drum roll please. Here is a data-set that I got from somewhere.

The problem – build a lookup formula

And the problem. Oh, simple. Write a lookup formula to find how many customer walk-ins we have on any given day.

But how?

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