This year has been the busiest year since the inception of Chandoo.org. We had 161 posts, 8,900+ comments, 33,500+ forum posts. We have trained more than 2,500 students thru training programs like Excel School & VBA Classes this year alone.
More than 6.5 million people visited our site this year (up 82%), consuming a whopping total of 17.8 million pages (up 69%). Each of these visitors spent an average of 2min 15 seconds on our site becoming awesome in Excel. There are 1.6 mn people who spend at least 15 minutes or more on our site.
We have also added 20,000 members to our newsletter / RSS readership this year, closing at 55,000 mark by end of 2012. It has been a hectic year.

Top 10 posts written in 2012
Speeding up Excel – 75 tips [Visitors: 36,157 ]
Using Excel as your database [ 32,455 ]
Comprehensive guide to VLOOKUP [ 23,745 ]
66 Dashboards visualizing Excel salary survey data [ 26,148 ]
Interactive Sales chart in Excel [ 21,444 ]
Compare 2 Excel sheets – howto? [ 21,820 ]
Send mails using Excel VBA & Outlook [ 22,294 ]
Customer Service Dashboard in Excel [ 18,136 ]
Making your dashboards interactive [ 15,294 ]
Extract numbers from text in Excel [ 18,490 ]
Honorable mentions
Formula Forensics – the series [ 75,000+ ]
12 ways to learn Excel [ 17,242 ]
Consolidate data from different Excel files using VBA [ 16,637 ]
Optimizing & speeding up Excel formulas [ 14,291 ]
Top 10 pages on Chandoo.org in 2012
Chandoo.org main page [Visitors: 500,833 ]
Excel Pivot Tables – Tutorial [ 422,298 ]
Excel Dashboards [ 311,199 ]
Excel Templates [ 304,777 ]
Project Management using Excel [ 196,489 ]
Gantt Chart Template [ 209,660 ]
Chandoo.org Forums Main Page [ 101,907 ]
Excel Quotation Template [ 158,482 ]
How to delete blank rows in Excel? [ 176,659 ]
Excel School page [ 154,175 ]
Honorable mentions
Project Management Templates in Excel [ 136,957 ]
Project Status Dashboard [ 113,127 ]
Excel Formulas not working…? [ 148,756 ]
Between formula in Excel [ 140,858 ]
VLOOKUP formula in Excel [ 135,220 ]
My personal favorites – top 3
While the above pages are what scored most attention and visits, I have immensely enjoyed writing below 3 articles.
Key trends this year
This year, I have spent quite a bit of time spreading Chandoo.org message in by conducting reader meets & live trainings. We have also emphasized on below areas,
- Making people awesome thru blog articles, newsletters, Excel & VBA classes.
- Teaching new ways of writing formulas thru formula forensics series.
- Engaging you thru homework problems, polls & contests.
- Having loads of fun & curiosity all the while.
Which posts did you enjoy most this year?
I hope you had a busy and fruitful year. Go ahead and tell us which posts, tips & articles you enjoyed most in 2012 using comments. And oh yea, wishing you a happy new year!














13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
[…] Finding non-performing customers using Pivot Tables […]