Here is an interesting twist on the good old VLOOKUP. How to find the pricing applicable for given quantity of a product?
Something like this:
Writing pricing tier lookup formula:
Meet the data:
Let’s say you have data like this:
Assume the data is in a table named pricing
PLOOKUP formula:
Okay, I am kidding. There is no PLOOKUP formula (P for Price). But we can whip our own version of PLOOKUP using other powerful formulas in Excel.
Let’s say we have product name in cell C6 and quantity in cell D6.
To find the applicable unit price of D6 units of C6 (for example 12 units of Mountain Bikes),
We can use below formula:
=SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price], pricing[Product],C6, pricing[Min. Qty],"<="&D6, pricing[Max. Qty], ">="&D6)
Remember: product prices are in the table named pricing.
How does this formula work?
This is a simple SUMIFS formula that looks at the unit price column of pricing table and sums up all unit prices that match with given product name (C6), with quantity (D6) between [Min. Qty] and [Max. Qty] columns.
In other words, this SUMIFS will narrow down to the one row containing Mountain Bike (11-25) tier and returns the price as $300, if our input is 12 units of Mountain Bike.
Oh wait..! What if the quantity is 32?
You are right, our SUMIFS is too lame to handle cases where the input quantity doesn’t fit in any of the tiers.
But, we can use a simple logic to fix this problem.
Here is the final formula that works in all situations:
=MAX( SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price], pricing[Product],C6, pricing[Min. Qty],"<="&D6, pricing[Max. Qty], ">="&D6),SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price],pricing[Product],C6,pricing[Min. Qty],""))
As you can see, we try to find the MAXIMUM of our original SUMIFS and a second SUMIFS that just looks at given product (C6) and blank value for [Min.Qty] column.
Of course, this assumes that prices go down with each tier. If your case is different, you need to alter the formula.
Download pricing tier lookup workbook:
Click here to download the example workbook. Examine the formulas and play with input data to learn how this works. There are two bonus goodies in the workbook.
- The conditional formatting on order form is slick.
- There is an alternative solution with INDEX+MATCH formulas in the data worksheet.
More variations of lookup problems:
Here are few more ways to lookup tricky data:
- Similar problem: Range lookup – find which range contains lookup value
- Case sensitive lookups
- VLOOKUP the last value
- Multi-condition lookup
- Lookup first non-blank value
- More ways to lookup your data
How would you write PLOOKUP?
While the SUMIFS approach works well, it does feel a bit long. Can you think of other ways to write pricing tier lookup formula? Post your answers in the comments section. Teach us something new.
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.