Last Friday, I asked you to analyze “sick leave entitlement vs. usage” data and answer homework questions. We got several interesting responses to that. Today, let me share a quick video highlighting how to analyze such data with Power Query.

This is part of our Power Mondays series, where every Monday you will learn something new & useful about Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot.
Leave Entitlement vs. Usage Analysis – The problem
The problem is simple. We have a bunch of employees with their leave entitlement. We also know how many leaves they took.

Given these two tables, you want to answer questions like:
- Which employees took exactly 100% of their allocated leave?
- Which people never took any leave?
- Who are the people taking 100% of their leave?
If you also know when an employee took the leave (date), you can ask questions like:
- Assuming leave entitlement resets at start of year (1 Jan), which employees are using 100% of their entitlement
Leave Entitlement vs. Usage Analysis – Solution with Power Query
While we can use Excel formulas (or VBA, pivot tables + power pivot etc.) to answer the questions above, I think using Power Query is the simplest way to crack this.
I made a quick video explaining the problem, solution, how to enhance it when you have multi-year data. Check it out below (or on our Youtube channel).
You will also learn:
- How to merge (join) two tables in Power Query
- Using basic & advanced group by in Power Query
- How to extract year from date values
- Replacing errors with some value
- Creating conditional columns in PQ
Download solution workbook
Click here to download the solution workbook for this topic. Examine the Power Query definitions to learn more.
How do you like the Power Query solution?
I love how versatile and elegant Power query based solutions are. What about you? Do you use PQ to solve problems like this? Please share your experience / feedback in the comments section.














4 Responses to “Office 2010 Contest Winners are here!!!”
I while ago I wrote a post on selecting a couple of names from a range via an UDF
I could have been handy.... especially because I didn't win.... lol
http://xlns.lamkamp.nl/?p=14
Sweet! I won! Thank you so much, Chandoo! I'm really speechless! I'll look out for an e-mail from you. Again, I really appreciate it, and I can't wait to fire it up!
Sincerely,
Tom "this one" 🙂
Thank You... Thank You... Thank You... 🙂
Hi,
Don't want to ruin your party.. 😉 but I noticed that when you sort the list A2:B11 (step 2), the RAND function re-calculates the numbers so that they are different and in mixed order again. I had to paste the whole area as values first and then sort to get it to work.
Wonder if the same happened to you because in your list at least Greg has a higher value than Tom 🙂