Story of Johnny, Hard working atom splitter:
Meet Johnny, who lives by the intersection of lane 2345, and BAG street. Johnny (or little Jon as friends call him) is a hard working family guy. He works at local nuclear power plant in a neighborhood named Sheet3. Due to a recent re-organization at work place, Jon found himself reporting to an almost crazy boss named “Bill Lumbergh”.
Now, Lumbergh is not your everyday crazy boss, he is so much more than that. So, one day Lumbergh walks over to Jon’s desk and tells him, “Look Jon, we are having issues in the particle accelerator in the basement. It doesn’t seem to split atoms alright. So I need you to go there and split atoms manually. We got 12,789,000 atoms to be split before next weekend. So I am gonna go ahead and ask you to work on it. Ummkay?”
Just when Johnny thought of uttering a curse, Lumbergh came back and reminded, “Oh Johnny, remember to log how much time you are spending splitting atoms. I need you to tell me how many hours you worked for every million atoms. Make sure you follow the latest Timesheet report formats, or else…,”
Johnny muttered a couple of real ugly cuss words that are not blog worthy and went about his business of splitting atoms. He managed split only 11 million of them before the deadline given by Lumbergh. Those darned atoms!
Also, Johnny logged the time he spent for every million atoms using, well, excel. Like this:
Your homework:
Johnny needs your help to figure out how many hours he worked in total (as well as for each million). He is already tired hunting a missing electron in the basement alleys. So don’t tell him to count manually. He wants to have an excel formula that tells him how many hours he worked given a start and end date in cells A1 and A2 respectively. Remember,
- Johnny never works after 6pm or before 9am
- Johnny never works on weekends.
- Lets say Johnny doesnt take any lunch breaks (he has developed a taste for those higgs bosons sandwich with positron milk shake).
So I am gonna go ahead and ask you to complete this homework before the weekend. When you got the correct formula, come back here and post it in comments. Ummkay?
More excel homework:
- Find out days overlapped between 2 dates
- Average of top 5 values
- More Home work | Formula tutorials & examples
PS: If you feel lost, that is because you have not seen office space. Go watch it.
PPS: if you still feel lost, that is because you do not know NETWORKDAYS. Go learn it.
21 Responses to “Distinct count in Excel pivot tables”
The distinct count option works well but I have found that if I have a date field and want to group by year, month, etc. that option seems to be disabled. I need to do both, distinct count and group by year/month.
Example data; sales orders with item quantities with dates.
Challenge; sum the item quantities, count the distinct orders and group by month. How do I do this?
Perhaps that's not possible due to the grouping?
@Al... When you use data model based pivots, you cannot group values manually anymore. Why not use Excel 2016's default date grouping option? In this case we have just a few dates, so Excel is not grouping them, but if you have an year's worth of data, when you make the pivot with date in the row label area, Excel automatically groups them. If you have fewer dates or want to use your own grouping, just create a table with all dates, add columns with month, week, year etc. Then connect this table (these types of tables are usually called as calendar tables) to your data on date field as a relationship. Now you can create reports by month, quarter etc easily.
Is this the only way to do it in 2013? I find it rather cumbersome to have to create another data table listing dates with the another column for MONTH() and YEAR() to be able to summarise data for senior level...
I know people find adding calendar tables cumbersome, but it is a best practice and let's you add more layers of analysis quite easily. For example, adding analysis by weekday vs. weekend or by financial quarter or YTD calculations (you would need either Power Pivot DAX or some very carefully setup pivot table value field settings)
I had absolutely no idea this was possible. Very useful, nice work!
Doesn't work for 2010 version though (or at least not my works version)
Hi ,
The post has the following in it :
These instructions work only in Excel 2016, Office 365 and Excel 2013.
when i have 2 different Pivot tables, one without the enabled “Add this data to data model” option, and the other one with it enabled.. is there anyway i can link slicers between them?
if the answer is NO,, what to do ?
Quick note, the “Add this data to data model” option is not available for the Mac version.
perhaps outside scope of this article but I have found when I attempt to create a pivot table from an external data source (connection to a sql view) the "Add this data to data model" becomes greyed out. Anybody experienced and found a solution so I can start getting distinct count in my pivot tables?
Is there a way to still add a calculated field when using distinct count?
I found I can't change the date source after tick the " add this data to the data model", can you help to adv how to change the date source in such case?
Is there a way to update the source once you have added to the data model? I receive a new spreadsheet weekly and would like to update the connection so my tables pull from the new source.
Hi Crhis, I like how you have hulk (superhero) as your avatar. Do you know that there is a superhero in Excel too? It's Power Query. You can use it to solve your problem in a simple click. Here an intro if you need some guidance.
Powerful Introduction to Power Query
A big Thank you. It worked.
Hi, have survey data that I need to analyze but the challenge is that my key fields are showing horizontally. I tried to transpose the fields using Power Query, but unfortunately the new fields are returning same values on a pivot table despite using distinct values
How I can a do a pivot table with discount conts in some columns and then generate shor report filter pages. pls it drives crazy
Hi. Why grand total pivot of distinct count is 13? shouldn't it be 67?
Great Answer! Saved me lots of time!
Thank you!!!
Worked awesome! Thanks!!
Hi Chandoo,
I am using pivot tables for distinct count and now I need to update them with new set of data. But when I update the source data, all the columns and formatting of Pivot table disappears and I need to build it from Scratch.
Is there a possibility that I can update the source data with new rows added and also retain my pivot tables?