Conditional Rank, the easy way [quick tip]
Yesterday, my mate from across the ditch, Hui posted about conditional rank formula (RANKIFS) using awesome SUMPRODUCT
Of course, not everyone can whip up a sumproduct formula like that. On a scale of One to Hui of Excel awesomeness, you would need to be at least an H to write sumproduct or countifs formulas shown in that post. So does it mean, you can’t conditional rank if you don’t know your X from L?
Don’t worry. We got you covered. You can still get your conditional ranks, without inception level array formulas. Simple, use pivot tables instead.
Selective Sub-totals in Pivot Tables [Quick Tip]
Recently I was creating a pivot report with multiple items in row labels area. I had to show sub-totals, but only for one of the fields. Something like above.
How to show selective sub-totals in Pivot Tables
Reshaping your data easily – Case study [Pivot tables FTW]
Late. Jayaram, my uncle is also a teacher. When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time with him, learning all sorts of things. He taught me chess, maths and so many life lessons. I remember one such lesson very vividly. One day, he asked me to do something. I did it in a very long way. After seeing me struggle for several minutes, he chipped in and showed me how to do it easily. He then said, “when someone asks you where your nose is, you don’t twist arm around your head. You just point to your nose directly.”
The idea is that when you have a direct, simple way to do something, you should use it.
Nose and pivot tables… how are they connected?
We are coming to the point. Read on for full case study and solution.
Sorting to your Pivot table row labels in custom order [quick tip]
Pivot tables are lovely. But sometimes they are hard to work with. Let’s say you are analyzing some HR data and want to see number of weeks worked in each hour classification.
And you want this.
Except, there is a teeny tiny problem.
The sort order on the classification is all messed up.
Here is a quick fix to get custom sort order on your pivot table row labels.
Finding the closest school [formula vs. pivot table approach]
First a quick personal update: There has been a magnitude 7.8 earth quake in NZ on 14th November 2016 early morning. It is centered in Kaikoura, which is about 250 km away from Wellington. We did feel several shakes and after shocks. It has been an interesting and often scary experience. But my family is safe. I feel very sad for the all the damage and the loss for families in NZ. If you suffered from this quake, My prayers and thoughts are with you.
Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question. He has school distance data, like above. He wants to know which is the closest school for each school.
There are a few ways to answer this question. Let’s examine two approaches – formulas & pivot tables and see the merits of both.
Find first & last date of a sale using Pivot tables [quick tip]
Here is a quick Pivot table tip. Let’s say your work at ACME inc. requires some fancy pants analysis of product sales. Imagine looking at below data & trying to find out the earliest & latest date for each product sale.
Of course, we can concoct a version of MINIFS & MAXIFS to answer the question. But why bother, when you can answer the question with just a few clicks.
Interactive Decision Tree Visualization in Excel [Trump vs. Hillary in Swing States]
It is election time in USA, and that means there is a whole lot of drama, discussions and of course data analysis. There are tons of cool visualizations published on all the data. Previously, we talked about “How Trump happened” chart.
Today let’s take a look at the beautiful decision tree chart by NY Times explaining what would happen if each of the 10 swing states vote for Democrats or Republicans. Go ahead and look at that chart. And when you are done playing with it, come back.
My first thought after looking at the chart is: Wow, that is cool. I wonder how we can recreate that experience in Excel?
But as you can guess, making a dynamic tree visualization in Excel is pretty hard. You can create a bubble chart mixed with XY chart to show all the nodes of the decision tree, but as this tree has 2^10 nodes at the bottom level (and 2^11-1 total nodes) our chart would look very clumsy and busy.
So, instead of replicating NY Times chart, why not make our own version that explains the data? You can reuse this idea when visualizing outcomes of several what-if scenarios.