First a quick personal update: There has been a magnitude 7.8 earth quake in NZ on 14th November 2016 early morning. It is centered in Kaikoura, which is about 250 km away from Wellington. We did feel several shakes and after shocks. It has been an interesting and often scary experience. But my family is safe. I feel very sad for the all the damage and the loss for families in NZ. If you suffered from this quake, My prayers and thoughts are with you.
Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question. He has school distance data, like below. He wants to know which is the closest school for each school.
There are a few ways to answer this question. Let’s examine two approaches – formulas & pivot tables and see the merits of both.
Formulas to find closest school
All the distance data is in a table named dist.
Assuming you have school names & types in cells H5, I5, we want to find out the closest school of any type and same type in adjacent columns, as shown below.
Let’s take a look at the formulas first. All of these are array formulas. So press CTRL+Shift+Enter after typing.
- J5: Closest School Distance (Any type): =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,dist[Distance]))
- K5: Closest School Name (Any type): =INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&J5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
- L5: Closest School Distance (Same type): =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,IF(dist[To Type]=I5,dist[Distance])))
- M5: Closest School Name (Same type): =INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&L5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
How do these formulas work?
Let’s examine them one at a time.
Closest School Distance (Any type)
Formula: =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,dist[Distance]))
How it works:
- We check if From school is same as the one in H5 and get the corresponding distances only.
- This will return a bunch of distances and FALSE values. Distances will be listed only for the schools that match H5, for all others, the IF() gives FALSE.
- We then pass this list to MIN formula to find the minimum distance.
As we are using arrays inside IF formula, we must press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
Related: Learn more about MAXIF & MINIF formulas.
Closest School Distance (Same type)
Formula: =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,IF(dist[To Type]=I5,dist[Distance])))
How it works:
- We check if From school is same as the one in H5 and if the [To Type] is same as I5 and get the corresponding distances only.
- This will return a bunch of distances and FALSE values. Distances will be listed only for the schools that match H5 and of type I5, for all others, the IF() gives FALSE.
- We then pass this list to MIN formula to find the minimum distance.
Finding the corresponding school name:
Once we know the minimum school distance, we just use array MATCH to find corresponding school number and get the name of the school with an INDEX().
=INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&J5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
As we are concatenating two lists in the MATCH formula, we need to press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
We use same logic to fetch school name for the distance in column L too.
Related: Learn about multi-condition lookups
Formula approach – comments
While the formula approach gives answers we want, it is very tricky to write these formulas. The MIN(IF(…)) structure is not easy to master.
As the formulas check entire data, they can be very slow on large sets.
Pivot table to find closest school
First create a pivot table from the dist table with below settings:
- Add From and From type to row labels area
- Add To and To type to column labels area
- Add distance to values area, summarize it by SUM
- Remove sub totals & grand totals
- Set up pivot in tabular layout
We get this.
At this stage, finding closest school gets easy. We simply use SMALL formula on each pivot table row to find 2nd smallest value (because smallest value is 0 and we should ignore it.) to get the distance. Finding school name is a simple matter of using INDEX + MATCH.
Of course, finding the distance for closest school of same type still requires using array version of SMALL with SMALL(IF(…)) structure. But this formula would be significantly faster as we don’t process all the 10000 rows of data.
Comments on Pivot Table approach
Pivot table approach simplifies the problem and helps us answer the questions faster. You can also apply conditional formatting on top of Pivot Table to instantly highlight closest school(s).
Download example workbook
Click here to download the closest school example workbook. Play with the formulas & pivot table to learn more. Examine the conditional formatting rules for some cool techniques.
How would you find the closest school?
By asking your neighbors, of course. Jokes aside, how would you find the closest school for a given school? Would you use formulas or pivot tables or some other approach? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Need to learn, here is your closest school
If you need to master Excel, look no farther. Excel School, your closest and most awesome online class makes you, well, awesome in Excel. Learn from basics to advanced concepts, all from the comfort of your office or home. There are over 50 lessons and dozens of sample workbooks to make you an Excel pro.
29 Responses to “Customer Service Dashboard using Excel [Dashword Week]”
Looks good, Mara. Keep up the good work!
Thx Mara, your work is great, congratulations...
wow ! Great stuff Mara !!
I am amazed on the work you did !
What I like about your dashboard
1. The first impression is the colors used. Very smart use of colors that matches each other, easy on the eye - make people wants to find out more !
2. Clear message shown for the tweetboard for Quick overview on the state of situation.
3. Use of creative titles for your charts "Information Desk".
4. Clear and uncluttered charts. Gives reader a clear perspective with good use of charts colors too.
5. Good use of Legend to describe what color meant "Highest Sales out of the three months"
6. Of course, good use of Check boxes and Slider bar to offer interactiveness on your charts.
Suggestions
1. You may want to consider formatting your Y and X axis labels to show thousands, in $500K format instead of $500,000, so you can even made your chart look much neater.
2. Budget Variant Chart - This one is special...I took a second look and try to understand it. I am not sure if this is the best chart to visualize Sales VS Budget and Variances. And the Variance of 16.19% is positive, so u may want to use conditional formatting to make it green color, red if negative.
Overall is Great Work and Great Effort !!! Keep it up and I am so proud of you !
Francis Chin
http://www.francischin.com
Great Work Maya, just wondering if "5" Scrollable list of various gift shop items, can compare the previous 2 and current month selected in the above picklist, just one more suggestion if we can use top 5 gift category by using donut and bar mix chart to show sales mix for different months
Chandoo I would like to thank you for posting such helpful tricks for creating dashboards, I have learned a lot from your KPI Dashboard demo, I have created one dashboard to compare performce of Sales Associates, thaks a lot again
Thanks for the idea! Great job! You are giving me a lot of inspiratons!
Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I'm such a novice at this so I was so grateful for Chandoo's class and for everyone who submits ideas on his blog.
Francis: Thanks so much for your comments. You're an inspiration. For the budget variance chart, I actually got that idea from one of Chandoo's post on budget vs actual. There was one that was simple and easy to read so I learned how to do that and made it dynamic. I'm open to any other ideas you have for budget vs actual. I'm always looking for ways to improve.
Sabrina: Thank you for you for your suggestion on the top 5.
Dear Mara,
Great work.
But i one suggestion regarding the INFORMATION DESK graph is consist of month but which year it belong is not there if it would be there it would be great.
Warm Regards
Bhushan Sabbani
+91 98208 26012
Thanks for this idea... Great Stuff !!
Excellent dashboard Mara.
The best I like about the dashboard is the choice of colors. They are cool and not distracting. Thanks for sharing the file.
@Chandoo
Thanks for the dashboard week Chandoo. I am learnt a lot in the last 2 days. I am excited over the next 3 days! 🙂
Regards,
Ravi.
Great work Mara ! Thanks for sharing .
Mara, I liked the line, "Need to be more helpful." Our government needs to print this line, laminate it and post it in all government offices for the staff to see.
Hi there, i have been recently visiting this blog it is really great, the best one for Excel, wish Chandoo great success ahead.
I have one query, if you protect the data sheet the chart with the checkbox gives and error saying the data is protected and cannot be modified, is there a way around. This is cause if we want to publish this to someone who should only see it and do no changes to the data, is it possible please guide.
This could be a silly but bear me i am novice to excel 🙂
Thanks.
nice work.
inspired me a lot, working on few dashboard projects...
[...] Customer Service Dashboard in Excel 14,326 [...]
[...] Customer Service Dashboard Example [...]
dear mara
looks great .any reason why you have not used the bullet chart for the actual vs target chart.on the whole it is simple and elegant .jay.
Dear Chandoo,
The word Dashboard in the heading is misspelt.
Wow. Very Nice work Mara. Next week I am going to take the Course, I will try to post my work here.
Thank you so much for your helpful blog. Always appreciated your tips and tricks.
I am proud that you belongs to our Vizag City.
The above comment, I forgot mentioned about Chandoo, those two paras is about Chandoo. 😀
Thank you Mara!
Thx Mara, your work is great, congratulations…
Great Work Mara!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi Chandoo,
I had been following your blogs for tips and tricks on excel. I am working with Media agency and we collect the data. Now this data has several parameters based on several legends. For eg Class A - legend color red, classB - legend color green and so on. Class A has several characteristics and parameters and heading etc. Now everytime we gather data and make pivot then based on the data in the pilot tables - top 10 we need to insert those in charts manually and also need to change the colors of legends and also. We create nearly 300 slides every month sector wise and it takes nearly our 4-5 days in doing that. Do you have any sample dashboard which will be helpfull to us and we can create it in a day.
Thanks really amazing one,
it helped me in desgining OTACE report
Regards
Gowravan M
9980651792
Awesome Job done here .............
very good master piece but wont to know if you can design KPI's for a financial institution. Thank you
I need help to make performance for our company
we have about 10 products from 5 years old