Last Friday, we have learned about an interesting formula – IFERROR Formula using which you can easily handle errors in Excel workbooks.
Quite a few people reading that page asked, “Wow, this is good. But how can I take a sheet full of =IF(ISERROR(…)….) formulas and convert them to =IFERROR()”
There is a different set of folks who asked “Wow, this is good. But quite a few of my colleagues use Excel 2003 and they see a bunch of #NAME errors when I send them an excel workbook with IFERROR formulas. Any help?!?”
I am pleased to announce that I wrote 2 simple macros, iferror2iserror() and iserror2iferror() that would scan formulas in a bunch of selected cells and convert them from IFERROR to ISERROR and vice-a-versa. Pretty cool, eh?
Download Excel Macros Workbook
Click here to download the workbook that has macros to convert IFERROR formulas to ISERROR formulas and vice-a-versa.
If you just want to examine the code:
Click here to view the VBA Module code.
What are these macros and how do they work?
The workbook contains 2 macros – iferror2iserror() & iserror2iferror().
What does iferror2iserror() macro do?
As the name suggests, It scans a bunch of selected cells for any IFERROR formulas and then converts them to ISERROR formulas.
For eg. if a cell has =IFERROR(expression, error), the output would be =IF(ISERROR(expression),error,expression)
What does iserror2iferror() macro do?
This macro scans a bunch of selected cells for any ISERROR formulas and then converts them to IFERROR formulas.
For eg. if a cell has =IF(ISERROR(expression),error,expression), the output would be =IFERROR(expression, error)
How to use these macros?
Very simple. Just select the cells with formulas and then run the required macro. The macros only affect cells with either IFERROR or ISERROR formulas.
What are the limitations of these macros?
These macros should hold good for many real life scenarios. That said,
- These macros do not check for IFERROR (or ISERROR) recursively. ie, if a formula has IFERROR inside another IFERROR, only the first one would be converted.
- These macros do not work when you have commas (,) inside the formula in double quotes. For eg. the below formula fails.
=IFERROR(VLOOKUP("Kirk, James",tblStarwars,2,false),"Captain not found"))
Your comments:
How do you convert IFERROR or ISERROR formulas? Do you use a macro or you manually change the formulas? Please share your techniques and ideas using comments.
Also, if you wish to modify the code, please feel free to do so. Share your work with rest of us thru comments so that we can benefit too.
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...