Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and am sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.
Why I found this Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet Cool?
There are probably a million other gift trackers out there, but I liked Steven’s version for few reasons:
- He used conditional formatting to zebra line the gift-table.
- He used array formulas to find-out who is receiving the most expensive gift. The formula relies on VLOOKUP coupled with SUBTOTAL so that when you filter the list to see gifts only for certain age group, the formula shows most expensive gift receiver in that group alone. How cool is that 😎
- He used cell formatting to highlight gifts overshooting budget in RED color.
- He used SUMPRODUCT liberally to summarize the gift data to show us “how many people got the gifts”, “how many gifts are over the budget”, “how many gifts are under-budget”.
Go ahead and download the workbook. Even if you dont have a huge list of gifts to buy this Christmas (REALLY ?!? You dont have a long list? Can I please, please get that wii?). The workbook is full of excel lessons on conditional formatting, formulas and design.
Download the Christmas Gift List Spreadsheet
Click here to download the file. It is protected to make sure you accidentally erase a formula or something. But there is no password. So go ahead and unlock it to learn something cool.
Thank you Steven,
for your most thoughtful and awesome Christmas gift to our community.
3 Responses to “CP049: Don’t do data dumps!!!”
Your title got me nervous because I'm all about data dumps, but not for attaching graphics to data dumps. My reason for using data dumps is when someone is trying to do analysis and their starting point is a report that's formatted in a way for a human to read. I instruct them to stop with the report and go get a data dump: just rows and columns and rows and columns.
Agreed, nearly all of my reports start with 100+ lines of simple table data.
That way you can build your functionality around pulling information from that tabled information.
Yes yes!