2014 has been the busiest year since starting Chandoo.org.
Wow, that is 11 years of breaking previous records. Thank you.
In 2014, we published 128 posts (up 27% YoY), received 6,000+ comments (down 19%). Our forum had 8,700+ new members, 6,650 new threads and more than 42,000 posts in 2014. This year, I have also launched Chandoo.org podcast. We had 26 episodes so far, totaling They were downloaded more than 240,000 times by our listeners.
Fun fact: People have spent more than 4 million minutes in 2014 listening to Chandoo.org podcast. (assuming only 50% of downloads materialized to listens)
We have trained more than 2,000 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & Power Pivot classes.
7.8 million people visited our site in 2014 (up 5%) and consumed a whopping 20 million web pages. Each visitor spent an average of 2:15 minutes on our site becoming awesome in Excel. There are 1.9 million who spent an average of 15 minutes or more on our site.
We have added another 25,000 users to newsletter / RSS followers. At the end of 2014, Chandoo.org has more than 100,000 registered members (excluding forum members) and 3,500 active students (and 5,000+ alumni out in trenches making awesome reports, workbooks and impressing their bosses).
Top 10 posts written in 2014
2014 Calendar & Daily Planner Template [views: 125,321]
Combine text values [quick tip] [views: 85,490]
Quick Gantt chart template [views: 54,792]
Best charts to show % progress [views: 39,727]
Calculate CAGR using Excel [views: 34,051]
State migration dashboard contest entries [views: 29,591]
Find first non blank item in a list using formulas [views: 24,294]
Dynamic Cascading Dropdowns [views: 20,571]
Right click from keyboard, not mouse [views: 20,186]
Multi condition VLOOKUP [views: 19,337]
Honorable mentions
Network relationship chart [views: 17,469]
Top 10 things I learned using Excel for a decade [views: 16,119]
World Elections in 2014 – chart [views: 12,443]
Top 10 Excel struggles and solutions [views: 11,916]
Thanks to guest bloggers Jeff & Sohail for such blockbuster content.
Top 10 Pages in Chandoo.org – 2014
As I have been running this site for more than a decade now, we have so much of accumulated content that gets a lot of visitors. Here are the top 10 pages that attracted insane amounts of traffic in 2014.
Chandoo.org homepage [views: 722,530]
Excel Dashboards – Information, tutorials & templates [views: 637,711]
Project Management using Excel [views: 489,937]
Advanced Excel Skills – what are they and how to build them? [views: 450,061]
Excel Pivot Tables tutorial [views: 298,379]
Free Excel templates [views: 294,748]
Excel formula help [views: 263,906]
What to do when Excel formulas are not working? [views: 249,776]
Excel Forum @ Chandoo.org [views: 237,185]
Between formula in Excel [views: 234,504]
Honorable mentions
Excel basics – what are they and how to learn them? [views: 230,856]
Excel VBA Examples [views: 208,176]
Excel SUMPRODUCT formula [views: 181,580]
Delete blank rows in Excel – quick tip [views: 176,151]
Welcome to Chandoo.org – a short introduction [views: 152,255]
Top 3 podcast episodes in 2014
In 2014, I have started Chandoo.org podcast. It is very well received by our community. Thank you so much. Here are the top 3 sessions of Chandoo.org podcast in 2014.
CP014: How to create awesome dashboards – 10 step process [listens: 16,827]
CP025: Sexy on spreadsheet, ugly on printout [listens: 14,817]
CP001: Introducing Chandoo.org podcast [listens: 14,592]
Key trends this year
This year our focus was on,
- Making more people awesome in Excel, Dashboards, Power Pivot & VBA
- Sharing Excel information in new Podcast format
- Meeting our readers face to face in conference & live classes in USA
- Engaging with you on social media via Facebook page, Pinterest boards & YouTube channel
- Playing with Excel, creating fun examples and sharing awesome content
- Running another amazing dashboard contest and learning from entries.
What do you enjoy most in Chandoo.org this year?
I hope you had a fantastic year learning and unlocking awesome powers of Excel in 2014. Please share your favorite posts, podcasts, videos and content (from Chandoo.org or elsewhere) in the comments section.
And before I forget, Happy New Year to you & your family.
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...