I have a quick announcement and an awesome graph for you.
First the announcement:
As you may know, I run an online Excel Training Program called as Excel School. I have opened registrations for 3rd batch of this program on September 14th. Thank you very much for supporting this program wildly. In a few hours, I will be closing the registrations for Excel School.
Click here to sign up for Excel School
(if you don’t want to join Excel School, we are still cool. Here is a free excel school. It is as awesome as morning coffee & donuts and totally healthy.)
How many students have joined so far?
At the time of writing this post (around 10 AM Indian time on 29th), we have 211 students signed up for Excel School 3. This is certainly quite a bit more than what I expected. But, I am also confident and eager to help as many of you as possible. So go ahead and join the program, because, you want to be awesome.
New content in Excel School 3 – Two hours on Dashboards
Apart from all the great and fun lessons in Excel School, I will be adding 2 more hours on Excel Dashboards. In this lesson you will learn,
1. What is a dashboard? – Definition, examples
2. Simple process for creating Dashboards using Excel
3. Making a dashboard using Excel in a step-by-step video
4. Tricks of the trade – tips, ideas and concepts you should learn to make awesome dashboards
When do the registrations close?
I will be closing new registrations by 11:59 PM (Pacific Time) Today. Pacific (Day) Time is 7 hours behind GMT (UTC). See the below graph to know when registrations close in your timezone:
(if you are still lost, see this handy table to know what time Excel School closes in your timezone.)
When is Excel School 4 coming up?
I will not be re-opening excel school this year. I am planning to spend time with students, answer their questions and have fun with my kids. I will be re-opening registrations during Jan 2011.
Now the awesome graph
You see the world map with closing times above? Your guess is right. It is made in Excel.
Here is how I constructed it
- First I downloaded an outline map of world (here is one).
- Then I calculated the closing times in various timezones using simple data formulas (here is a how-to – scroll to end)
- Then I made a scatter plot with Y as zero and X as horizontal position of the country with some random values.
- Then I set the world outline map as background for the plot area.
- Now, I adjusted x values so that the scatter points align with various countries
- Then I added 100% vertical error bars on plus side to show the vertical lines.
- Finally I added the closing times as data labels (you need to manually point each label to the source, but its ok)
See this illustration to understand the chart:
Download Time Across world – Graph template
I have made a template to show time across various places in world.
Thank you
Thank you so much for making Excel School 3 happen. Your support and quest for knowledge motivates me. Thank you.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.