Analyzing 20,000 Comments

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On 14th July, evening 4:51 PM (GMT), Chandoo.org received its 20,000th comment. 20,000!
The lucky commenter was Ishav Arora, who chimed, “Like super computers…Excel is a super calculator!!!!” in our recent poll.

It took us 8 years & 15 days since the very first comment to get here. And it took just 1 year 7 months & 23 days to add the last 10,000 comments (we had our 10,000th comment on 21st November, 2010).

Chandoo.org 20,000 Comments - Analysis

Out of curiosity, I wanted to understand more about these 20,000 comments. So I downloaded our comment database, dumped it in Excel and start analyzing.

Understanding the comment growth

Although Chandoo.org has been around since 2004 July, we grew particularly chatty since 2009, when the site started becoming popular. If you look the time from first comment to now & plot total comments by date, this is how it looks. Each 1000 is highlighted (and 5,000s are marked in green).

Comment Growth by date - Chandoo.org comments

While it took us more than 5 years to get to 5,000 comment mark, the next 5k came in less than an year. Now a days, we are adding 114 comments every week.

Here is another chart, showing how many days it took us to get each successive thousand comments.

Days taken for each 1000 comments - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

Which months & days of week are popular?

Lets look at monthly trends of comments since 2008.

Comment trend by month - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

As you can see, All the months have seen growth since 2008 (and yoy for most months).

And when it comes to weekdays, Thursdays & Fridays are most popular with Chandoo.org commenters.

Comments by weekday - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

Who comments on Chandoo.org?

Between Hui & me, we have left 2,650 odd comments on Chandoo.org. The top 10 commenters have left a whopping total of 3,695 comments to date.

Lets look at how many comments are left by first time commenters vs. existing commenters.

Existing commenter is someone who has left a comment earlier with same email id.

# of comments left by first timers vs. repeat commenters  - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

As you can see, During first 10,000 comments, existing commenters used to rule. Now a days, about 40% comments are from new commenters.

Do newsletter subscribers comment?

We have more than 36,00 odd people tuned in to our newsletter. I wanted to know how many of them leave comments.

Comments by subscribers vs. non-subscribers - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

About 45% of comments are from Newsletter commenters. About 5% of our newsletter subscribers (2,055 people) actually comment. The rest are happy to read the newsletter and learn.

That means, on average, each newsletter subscriber adds 5 comments (where as non-subscribers add only 2 comments)

How much % of comments are from Top 10 commenters?

In the early days (for first few thousand comments), Top 10 commenters used to contribute 50% of comments. Now a days, their contribution is at 20%. This is because of the huge number of commenters we are adding every month. As our community grew, we have lots of people who are helping each other.

# of comments by Top 10 commenters vs. rest - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

Top 10 commenters – then & now

Here is how top 10 commenters fared since first 5000 comments. You can see how Hui raised to Top 2 from nowhere & how we lost some of the frequent commenters over time.

Who are the top 10 commenters and how they ranked over time - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

Where do the comments go?

In early days, comments are always on the latest articles. So if a post is one month old, it is quiet. But now a days, we are adding more comments on older posts than on new ones. Thanks to Google, people are discovering older content more and asking questions (or thanking us) there.

Comments on older posts vs. latest posts - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

Which posts attract most comments

Next, lets see which posts are most chatty. But looking at # of comments alone is not enough. So I added % of page views (out of total page views on Chandoo.org between a sample period of APR-JUN 2012) and yearly break-up of comments received since 2008. As you can see, some posts are like blips, they get lots of comments and then become quiet. These are often polls, one time messages (like congratulations, happy new year etc.). The other posts consistently attract a lot of comments because they are visited by hundreds of people every week.

PS: You can click on link to see the actual post.

What do the commenters say?

I have an in house metric to see what the commenters say. It is called as Awesomeness Quotient. It is very simple to measure. I check the comment text to see if any of these words are in it.

Love, awesome, wow, !!, great, incredible, super, fantastic, blowing, perfect, excellent

If so, I give the comment 1 point. Else 0 points.

Then, I add up all these points to see how many points we have over the total number of comments.

Comment awesomeness quotient - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

As you can see, we have been hovering around 45% awesomeness quotient since inception.

PS: If I had a $ every time, someone said cool, I would have 335 cool ones.

Most frequent words in the comments

The most frequent word in our comments is Excel, used 4,650 times. The next frequent word is thank used 4,554 times. I guess that sums up what commenters say nicely.

Here is a list of 64 59 most frequent words (arranged by frequency and alphabetical order).

Note: Each sparkline has its own axis maximum. You cannot compare frequency of one word with another by looking at their heights.

Note 2: If you want this info with same axis maximum for all, click here.

Frequent words in comments - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

Comments vs. Posts

Here are 2 tag clouds, one for the content in posts & the other for comments. Can you guess which is which?

[click here for larger version]

Text in comments vs. text in posts - wordle word cloud - Chandoo.org 20,000 comment analysis

The left one is for comments.

Interesting Trivia

  • 51% of comments are made with in one week after an article is published.
  • We add 4% more in 2nd week, 4% more in next 2 weeks. That is, only 59% of comments are made with in one month of writing an article.
  • We get 70% comments between 8AM-8PM (GMT). The busiest hours for commenting are 1PM & 5PM GMT
  • Since 1st Jan 2010,
    • We had 7 quiet days (days with 0 comments).
    • And on 4 days, we received 100 or more comments
    • We got 17 comments on Christmas & New year days
  • The longest comment was 11,274 characters long by Ronald on 2nd June, 2010.
  • There are 5 comments with more than 5,000 characters long.
  • For every legitimate comment, we get 20 spam comments. So since Jan 2008, our spam filters have blocked 417,104 spam comments.

How these charts are made?

At least 5 cups of coffee, 2 hours of thinking, several hours of SQL, VBA, Pivot & SUMIFS, an hour of formatting & conditional formatting and may be 10 minutes on Wordle.net.

I am unable to share the actual Excel file with you as there is lots of sensitive data (email addresses, IPs etc.) and the file is too heavy – 30 MB at last count.

Do you comment on Chandoo.org?

If you have never left a comment, now is your time. Go ahead and lose your comment virginity. It feels awesome to share your thoughts with rest of us.

And if you are a commenter, well, you have my love & good thoughts. Go ahead and say something more. You know I am all ears to hear what you say.
Go ahead and leave a comment. Next stop, 30k.

Thank you

Thank you so much for taking time to learn from Chandoo.org. Special thanks to 7,278 of you who left a comment on Chandoo.org ever.

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23 Responses to “Shift Calendar Template – FREE Download”

  1. Alvin says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    your recent postings include only Excel 2007 templates. Unfortunately the company I work at still runs Excel 2003. Is it possible to get your awesome files in other excel version as well?

    Thanks so much for your great excel stuff!

  2. Stelios Tserkezis says:

    Is it possible to do this for shifts with hours instead of days? To organise a three shift day?

    Thanks in advance,

    Stelios

  3. MASTHAN says:

    In my organization there are 45 employees i need split then into three shifts ex:A shift:14,B shift:14,C shift:14 and week off:3 kindly help me on this.

  4. Hui... says:

    @Masthan

    You need to understand what rules your company has for the various shifts / roster combinations

  5. Georges Lacombe says:

    Chandoo, I once did a shift control spreadsheet for my team. I put one person in each line, the columns were the days. I put a shift code in each cell indicating in which shift that person should work, or if the person were out that day. I have two codes for being out. One is for vacations and one is to compensate days worked in weekends. This way I was able to count how many persons I have in each shift, how many were on vacations and how many were out compensating (that's the term we use here) weekend worked hours.
    Later I included the possibility of a person be in two lines one for normal hours other for overtime. This is mainly used for planning purposes. If you would like I can send you an example. The only problem of this spreadsheet is that we don't have a person view, only this consolidated view.

    • Chuck Vaughan says:

      Hi George, I would like to have a copy of your spreadsheet if you can share it.
       
      Thanks in advance, Chuck   

  6. Idan says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    Where is the code located ? is it VBA ? If so , how do you hide it ? Or it is .NET ?

    Thx

  7. Hui... says:

    @Idan
    .
    No VBA or code, it is all done with Mirrors.
    Only Joking,
    .
    But there is no VBA or code,
    It is all done with Named Formulas and Lookups.
    Have alook at the cells in the calander area and Named Formulas in the Formulas, Name Manager Tab.

  8. Anand Sant says:

    How can i calculate between two or more different workbooks? Please, reply me as early as possible.

    • Hui... says:

      @Anand
      Open the workbooks you want to link to
      Start a formula = and click and change between workbooks as required.
      You can use the View, Switch window menu to change workbooks mid formula

      The format for using workbooks is
      =[Workbook.xlsm]Sheet1!$A$1
      or
      =SUM('[Book2.xls]Sheet1'!$A$1:$D$10)
      etc

  9. Shemi says:

    Hi Chandoo,
    I am working with a call centre wherein i ned to update at the month end 20 to 30 employees login hours which are defict to track it at the month end is very difficult is there any template which can be made to track that why on a particular day a guy who needs to be on calls was why not on calls.

  10. Denice Lognshaw says:

    Thank you so much Chandoo. This is really helping me. As usual, you rock.

  11. Mukesh Verma says:

    What's FortyTwoDays and Calendar in Name manager?

    Both are unused and FortyTwoDays doesn't make any sense.

  12. Dave says:

    I have a SQL db that contains records of events scheduled/completed on a particular date. Can this method ous building a calendar be used to display those events on the respective day?

  13. Jan Halliday says:

    Positively awesome!
    I'm attempting to help a friend create a schedule for adult classes - and of course its not"paid help".  Here is the scenario:
    20 classes, instructor, room#, student class size, start date, number of class days (need to subtract weekends)

    class
    instructor
    room
    students
    start
    #days

    PATH
    karen
    201
    21
    01/01/13
    11

    BILLING
    jane
    401
    15
    01/12/13
    13

    MEDISOFT
    mike
    301
    11
    01/25/13
    9

    he'd like to see these classes show up in different colors within the same month's calendar chart.  He can draw it, but I'd like to see it done automatically through data, and I just can't visualize it, but I KNOW this will work - can you help?
    Jan 🙂
     

  14. Chan Tean says:

    Dear chandoo,

    Try many way to download still can't access. Any way we want to try out 3 shifts with 3 guys in a group .eg Group A Morn, Group B Night and Group C Rest. And every each group must work on sunday to take turns. In fact we are security teams so that's why sunday is required to work. Pls guide and show how to put in the working calendar. Thank you in advance.

  15. Veronica Burggren says:

    I've been trying to copy and/or recreate this to use in a workbook I'm doing for the transportation department I'm working for. I need to have the calendar on the first sheet in my document (it has graph's from data on another sheet). I'm trying to use it to track (with the conditional formatting) accidents and injuries. I've redone the conditional formatting to do 4 different accident types (no injury, near miss, OSHA recordable injury and work loss injury), but when I enter the formula's you have in the calendar portion where it says "DateOfFirst-FirstWeekDay" I can't figure out how you did that. Are you able to help?

  16. Pipin Fantom says:

    I would like to use Excel to solve the following problem for a community work. I want to create a Driver schedule for a given month from a pool of volunteers for a community service. Each of these volunteers can drive only on specific days in a week. I would like to populate the driving schedule for each weekday with primary, secondary and tertiary drivers in a random fashion so that I do not overburden one person. I would greatly any help you can provide.

  17. Ravichandra says:

    Hi chandoo,
    Thanks for your valuable effort for create this template and let me know how to add multiple employees in the the Roaster.

  18. Savitha says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    This article on shift roaster is very helpful. Could you please let me know how i can use the same for n number of resources who work 24/7, considering their leaves and holidays?

    Thanks,
    Savitha

  19. Balu says:

    Hi Chandoo,

    This article on shift roaster is very helpful to all. Could you please let me know how i can use the same if I want to add for some more shifts, since the color is not getting change if I add more shifts like 4,5 etc.,

    Thanks,
    Murali

  20. Sarah says:

    How can I change the date to 2017 under Shift Data worksheet.

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