Formula Forensics 040 – Apportioning Sales by Criteria
Lets look at how to apportion sales according to multiple criteria
Not so wild lookups [video]
In case, this is the first time you are hearing about Excel formula wildcards, check out the Using wildcards in Excel VLOOKUP formula tutorial.
So you know about wild cards like * ?, now how would you tell VLOOKUP to ignore them?
Say, you are genuinely interested in looking the value “* Payroll” in a lookup table. What then?
This is exactly the problem faced by Peter in our forum post VLOOKUP and cells with “*” NOT to be interpreted as wildcard
Pricing Tier Lookup formula
Here is an interesting twist on the good old VLOOKUP. How to find the pricing applicable for given quantity of a product?
Something like above.
Looks interesting? Then read on…
Edit cells & formulas faster [shortcut]
Let’s keep this simple & short.
Whenever you are editing cells or formulas, the usual sequence is like this:
- Double click on the cell you want to edit
- For existing cells: Go to the left most / right most part and start typing
- For blank cells: start typing right away
Here is a faster sequence:
Read on…
Use NUMBERVALUE() to convert European Number format
If you deal with customers or colleagues in Europe, often you may see numbers like this:
- 1.433.502,50
- 9.324,00
- 3,141593
When these numbers are pasted in Excel, they become text, because Excel can’t understand them.
Here is a simple way to convert the European numbers to regular ones.
Use NUMBERVALUE() Function.
Weighted Sorting in Excel [video]
Imagine you are looking customer data like below and want to sort them by performance. If you sort the data by any one column, you will not get full picture of performance. To understand which customers rank low on performance, you need to defined a weighed sort, the kind of sort where you assign weights to each attribute (customer age, recent purchases and rate of returns) and come up with single score to sort them all.
Sounds interesting? Watch below video to understand how to do weighted sorting in Excel.
Case Sensitive Lookups
We all know that VLOOKUP (and its cousins MATCH, HLOOKUP and LOOKUP) are great for finding information you want. But they are helpless when you want to do a case-sensitive lookup.
So how do we write case sensitive VLOOKUP formulas?
Simple. We can use EXACT formula.