All articles in 'Excel Challenges' Category

Are you ready for an Excel challenge?

Today, your job is very simple. Just find a pattern in a text and return corresponding value.

Your Homework:

In a range we have some resource types & their billing rates.

In another range, we have some descriptions. Each description contains a resource type somewhere inside it. We need to retrieve billing rate for each description by looking up which resource type is mentioned in it.

See above diagram.

Its Home work time folks. Sharpen your Excel pencils and get cracking.

Find out if 2 dates are in same month

Lets say you have 2 dates in A1, A2.

Q1. What formula tells us if both of them are in same month?

Both dates must be in same month & year!

Go ahead and post your answer in comments.

Here is a formula challenge for you. Lets say we have 2 lists of values in A1:A10 & B1:B10 Now, how do you find the number of common values in both lists? We just want the count, not list of common values it self. Go ahead and figure out the formula and post your answers […]

Finally the wait is over. Eager to know who won our Excel Salary Survey Dashboard contest? Read on.

So who is up for a challenge? Can you use only formulas and extract dates buried inside text?

1. Download this file.
2. In column C, write a formula such that you can extract the date in column B
3. If you succeed, post your solution here as a comment.
4. If you fail, drink some coffee, start afresh.

Watching the Olympic athletes run & jump all I could think of is,

• What should I eat to jump & sprint like that?
• How come I never heard about steeple chase?
• Should we really have 3 bullet points in all lists?

But I digress. Coming back, when watching one of those hurdles events, I got an idea as sharp as Chinese table tennis team.

Why not create a hurdles game in Excel to measure how good you are with keyboard?

So ladies & gentleman, let me present you our very own Olympics hurdle run.

Its contest time again! Put on your creative hats & bring your Excel skills to the game.

Analyze more than 1900 survey responses & present your results in a stunning fashion, and you could walk away with an XBOX 360 + Kinect Sports Bundle (valued at $299).

Sounds interesting? Read on.

So who is up for an Excel challenge?

Shelly, who is an HR Manager sent this distress call last week,

“I have a group of employees- lets say 100 employees. Each employee has a performance rating attached to them. I want to divide the group by 5%, 15%, 65%, 10%, 5% based on their performance rating.”

And that is our challenge today. Read on & help Shelly.

If I were to hire an data analyst, I would simply ask them to write a complex IF formula in Excel. If they can write it, the interview progresses, else, they are out. In other words,

=IF(person_can_write_big_fat_IF_formula=TRUE, proceed_with_interview, say_thanks_and_call_next_person)

If you are able to write IF formulas for any situation, then you are bound to be awesome in Excel.

So, to test how well you know your IFs & Boolean functions, let me give you a small challenge.

While I was away, Hui did a splendid job of starting a new series called Formula Forensics. The idea is to break down formulas for difficult real-world problems so that we can understand them better. In that spirit, I am giving you an interesting and tough formula homework. Situation: Imagine you work for Large Fries […]

Hi All. I am about to head off on holidays for a couple of weeks during which time I will only have limited internet access and won’t be helping out here at Chandoo.org or at the ExcelHero Academy whilst away. I thought I may leave a few words and a Challenge for everyone. History In […]

Hello Data Junkies & Chart Lovers, I have a fun announcement for you. If you like to analyze data and present results in charts, then you can win up to $3000 in prizes by participating in Microsoft’s BI DataMashUp Contest. The contest is on from September 8th and runs until 28th. How to Participate in […]

Some of you have heard my neighbor’s dog bark in a video or two that I recorded. While I was busy explaining how to do something awesome in Excel, this dog would decide to bark, adding her own two cents to the lesson. Quite a few of my VBA class students have grown used to it. So much that they complain when a lesson doesn’t have a couple of woofs. But I digress.

So coming back, one of the dogs (probably stray) has decided that she should bring her infant puppies and hide them under our terrace stair case. So, now we have 2 cute little puppies barking day long (and very late in to the night) just outside my office window. We have tried hard to get rid of them, but they somehow sneak back in and start barking or crying. So, I will be busy this weekend trying to move them out.

But that doesn’t mean, you have to live Excel-less for a few days. So I have a homework.

OR XOR AND, Get busy this weekend!

Don’t worry. I am not speaking elvish or something. OR, XOR & AND stand for bit-wise operations. This week, your task is to write formulas in Excel that would get the bit-wise results for AND, OR & XOR.

Recently, I ran a contest asking you to analyze a bunch of sales data and present your results in charts. We received a total of 78 charts from 45 people. The contest entries had a mind-boggling variety of excel charts, techniques and ideas. It took me a while to go thru all the files and compile the results. Thanks for your patience. In this post, you can find all the charts along with my comments & links to download files.

We have some home work folks! Today, lets test your Excel formula skills by giving some data related to a fund.

The problem:
You manage a fund for a non-profit. You have donors who pledge certain amount at the start of the year. As you go thru the year, the donors donate money to your fund. At the end of the year, you have a table like above. And you need to summarize the fund’s performance by calculating various statistics.

Go