In the 28th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s figure out how to express business rules & logic to Excel.
What is in this session?
What good are spreadsheets if they can’t solve business problems?
But we all struggle when it comes to modeling real world business conditions in Excel. For example, if you have below business rule to decide how much discount to offer a customer,
- If the customer bought 3 or more times previously and offer 15% discount
- If the customer bought 1 or 2 times previously AND customer’s age is >40, offer 10% discount
- If the customer visited our New York store between 6PM-9PM offer 5% discount
- Else no discount
How would you go about modeling these in Excel?
That is our topic for this podcast session.
In this podcast, you will learn
- The challenge of modeling business logic & rules in Excel
- My struggles with such formulas in early days
- 4 features of Excel that can help you with this.
- 1. Logical formulas
- AND
- OR
- NOT
- XOR
- 2. Support formulas
- IF
- IFERROR
- CHOOSE
- 3. Information formulas
- IS functions
- 4. Operators
- Brackets
- +*- operators
- Example business rules & how to write formulas for them
- Conclusions
Listen to this session
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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Click here to download the MP3 file.
Links & Resources mentioned in this podcast
Logical formulas – Syntax & Examples:
Support functions & concepts:
Advanced business rules & scenarios:
Homework for you:
- Write a formula to check if 2 dates are in same month
- Write a formula to check if few cells have same value
- An IF formula challenge for you
- Can you calculate sales commission?
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
What challenges do you face when modeling business rules / logic?
When I was learning Excel, I struggled a few years understanding the concept of logical functions. Of course I was in college, so I had all the time in world to explore and learn.
What about you? Do you write formulas that model real world logic? Where do you struggle? Please share your thoughts & inputs in comments section so that I can help you better.
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11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.