Ever wanted to count distinct values in your pivot tables? Something like above:

Let’s say you have store sales data. Several products are sold on each day. When you make a pivot table from this data and add product count, Excel counts all products. But we want to see just the distinct count (ie if there is a duplicate product in a day, we want to count it just once).

Here is a simple trick to add distinct count to Excel pivot tables easily.

Call them by any name – Budget vs. Actual, Target vs. Actual, Goal vs. Progress, KPIs, Performance charts, but they are the bread and butter of business charting. So how about a drop dead gorgeous and insightful chart for your next meeting with the folks upstairs? Something like above.

Read on to learn how to create this chart in Excel.

On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.

First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.

It is star wars day. Let’s celebrate the ultimate nerd day of the known universe in a way that resonates with us. Let’s dress up as storm troopers and make exploding 3d pie charts.

Just kidding. Let’s just make a cool visualization in Power BI instead.

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 35 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

We all know that Pivot Tables are best thing since avocado on toast. But they can’t slice text values and spread them in a table with Pivots. So how to take a large blob of text and turn it in to something meaningful like above?

Simple, we use Power Query.

Are you hungry from some Excel awesomeness? It’s launch time. I am very happy to announce that our most popular analytics online class – 50 ways to analyze data is opening up for enrollments in first week of May 2018. As the name suggests, 50 ways program is all about data and making sense of it. You will learn many ways to analyze, visualize and present data to your clients and superiors. Next time someone asks you, “Can you look at this data and tell us what is going on?” you can confidently say YES.

Learn all about 50 ways program and signup for the waiting list.

In this article, Let me show case one of the examples from 50 ways to analyze data course and how it can help you.