Imagine you work at MI5 as a HR officer. You want to find all agents who have license to kill (licence 7). Your data looks like this:
How would you go about it?
If you filter the list or use FIND() or SEARCH() formulas, you will end up with agents who also have licenses 77, 17 or not7. So how would you solve this problem?
Of course, you do what any smart person does. You summon Excel and ask it nicely by using some wicked pattern matching logic.
Finding all cells with 7 in them
Assuming the licenses are in column [licenses], you can use below formula to check if it has 7:
Step 1: Make an extra column, say [Two more commas] and use this formula.
=", "&[@licenses]&", "
Step 2: Now use below formula to find if a license has 7 in it:
=COUNTIFS([@[Two more commas]] , "* 7,*") > 0
This formula returns TRUE if [@licenses] has 7.
So how does it work?
There are three cases for licenses with 7 in them, as shown below.
Once we prefix & suffix COMMASPACE to this, we end up with a text that has the pattern:
<COMMA SPACE number><COMMA SPACE number>...
Now, we simply look for the pattern SPACE7, in this by using the * wildcard along with COUNTIFS.
=COUNTIFS([@[Two more commas]], "* 7,*")
We add a check to see if the count is greater than ZERO (ie did we find the pattern?)
So there you go. Now you can find the agent who can nab the targets.
Related: Using wildcards * ? in Excel VLOOKUP & other functions | Introduction to SUMIFS formula
Adding a few plot twists
Now, your MI5 career would be awfully boring, if there are no plot twists. So Q calls you in to her office and says, “We need a list of all agents who have any of the licenses 7, 65 or 63. Oh, while you are at it, tell me which agents have all three licenses.”
Damn you Q
the evil is you
for making me do
work I don’t want to
Damn you Q.
Added later: Okay, My James Bond knowledge is not very good. M is the boss of MI5, not Q. So let’s assume M calls you in to her office and gives you this task. As usual, you go:
Why do this M?
Everything is ho hum
and then you come
to tell my work is not yumm
Why do this M?
So you are back to your desk. Now the licenses to find are in a named range called list.
You can use COUNTIFS() pattern find logic to get the answer.
For sake of simplicity, let’s assume that you have a new column in your data table called as [Two more commas]
Does the agent have any of the licenses in list?
=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIFS([@[Two more commas]],"* "&list&",*"))>0
The internal COUNTIFS returns an array of values, which the SUMPRODUCT simply adds up.
Does the agent have all of the licenses in list?
=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIFS([@[Two more commas]],"* "&list&",*")) = COUNTA(list)
Now, let’s hope Q doesn’t add more plot twists. And if she does, you can always post them in the comments so internet can solve them.
Related: Introduction to Excel SUMPRODUCT function
How would you find license to kill?
I am sure COUNTIFS is not the only way to do this. So what would you do in this case? Will you use formulas / VBA or Power Query? Or something else altogether? Go ahead and share your approach in the comments section.
Note: Thanks to Brian who emailed me this problem.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.