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I recently finished a long consulting gig with one of the government ministries in New Zealand. Guess what I was doing? HR Analytics and Reporting. In this post, I want to share my top 5 Excel tips for HR people, based on what I learned in the last 18 months.

Specifically, we will cover:

• Gathering and structuring Employee data in Excel
  • How to use Power Query to collect data
  • Polish / clean data in Power Query
  • Bring cleaner data to Excel as refreshable table
• Answering questions about employees
  • Using Excel formulas such as COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS
  • Pivot tables for data analysis
  • Understanding the results quickly with conditional formatting
• Understanding pay gap
  • Calculating gender pay gap
  • Visualize pay gap
• Creating salary distribution charts
  • Working with histogram charts in Excel 2016 / Office 365
  • Making interactive charts
• Generating letters thru mail merge
  • Calculating employee bonus based on bonus mapping logic
  • Creating 100s of letters with a single click using Mail Merge + Word

Sounds interesting? Read on for details.

Ever wanted to calculate distance using Excel  – between two locations (physical addresses)? If we know the addresses, we can go to either Google Maps or Bing Maps and type them out to find the distance and travel time. But what if you are building some model (or calculator) and want to find out the […]

Would you like to spend next 5 minutes learning how to create an mutual fund tracker excel sheet?

Make a live, updatable mutual fund portfolio tracker for Indian markets to keep track of your investments using this example.

We love spreadsheets. And of course, once every four years, we also get mad about soccer. So why not merge both of them in to one awesome, frivolous and fun thing: Introducing….

The best part is you don’t have to run up to play this. Set your aim and let RANDBETWEEN() decide your fate.

The first step of getting awesome in Excel is to understand that you can ask Excel do things for you. This is done by speaking a special language called as “Excel Formulas”. When you write a formula or function, you are asking Excel to figure out something from the values you have. Say you want to add up a bunch of values in a range A1:A10, you can ask Excel to do this for you by writing =SUM(A1:A10) and bingo, you get the result immediately. The best part is, if your numbers change, the answer changes too.

If you are a beginner, the world of Excel formulas can feel overwhelming. Why not? There are hundreds of different formulas in Excel.  So which formulas should you learn?

This guide gives you the answer. Here are 100+ most common Excel formula examples for every occasion. Each box describes a problem statement, an example, result, some notes and link to learn more. Use this guide to learn formulas quickly.

Ever wondered how to undo in Power Query. If you try to press CTRL+Z or look for undo icon in Power Query (either in Excel or Power BI), you will not find it. The reason is simple. There is no undo in Power Query. So how to undo ?

Time for some soccer fun in spreadsheets. Given a team points table like above,

How would you figure out in Excel, which teams qualify for next stage. The rules for this exercise are,

• Pick the top two teams by points
• If there is a tie, use Goal Difference (GD) to break ties (more GD is good)
• If there is a tie, use Goals For (GF) to break ties

Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.

What is an excel table?

Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”

So you have decided to up your game with Excel and / or Power BI this year and now ravenously looking for books to read. You have come to the right place. Here is my list of recommended best Excel books, and books on Power BI, visualization, dashboards, VBA, Macros and analytics.

Use below links to navigate the relevant section of this page:

• Excel Books
• Books for data & visualization
• Power BI Books
• Excel VBA Books
• My own books

FIFA world cup 2018 is around the corner. I love soccer, I love Excel, Let’s marry them. Here is an awesome, free FIFA world cup Excel Tracker to help you follow this year’s games in Russia.

Click here to download the FIFA worldcup 2018 tracker.

What you can do with this FIFA world cup Tracker Excel?

You can use this tracker to,

• View schedules in your local time for group and knockout stages
• View summary and detailed points table
• Refresh live points table. When you refresh, the tracker show updated points based on latest results (You need Excel 2016, Office 365 or older versions of Excel with Power Query)
• View knockout stage matches as a bracket
• See timeline of the matches

Excel SUMIFS function is used to calculate the sum of values that meet any criteria. For example, you can calculate the total sales in east zone for product Pod Gun using SUMIFS formula.
In this article, you will learn:

• What is SUMIFS function and how to use it?
• Syntax for SUMIFS
• Using SUMIFS() with tables and structural references
• SUMIFS examples – simple, wild card
• Using SUMIFS() with date & time values
• Free sample file for SUMIFS formula
• More formulas for data analysis

Once in a while everyone is bound to come across this problem. You type a formula in a cell, then you press ENTER. Bam! nothing happens. You check if a donut chunk went in to the key board and some how jammed the ENTER key. So press it again, this time harder. But nothing. Excel […]

Ever wanted to count distinct values in your pivot tables? Something like above:

Let’s say you have store sales data. Several products are sold on each day. When you make a pivot table from this data and add product count, Excel counts all products. But we want to see just the distinct count (ie if there is a duplicate product in a day, we want to count it just once).

Here is a simple trick to add distinct count to Excel pivot tables easily.

Call them by any name – Budget vs. Actual, Target vs. Actual, Goal vs. Progress, KPIs, Performance charts, but they are the bread and butter of business charting. So how about a drop dead gorgeous and insightful chart for your next meeting with the folks upstairs? Something like above.

Read on to learn how to create this chart in Excel.

On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.

First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.