This is the fourth installment of project management using excel series.
Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts
Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
Project Status Reporting – Create a Timeline to display milestones
Part 4: Time sheets and Resource management
Issue Trackers & Risk Management
Project Status Reporting – Dashboard
Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project Progress
Timesheets are like TPS reports* of any project. Team members think of them as an annoying activity. For managers, timesheets are a vital component to understand how team is working and where the effort is going. I will not get in to the merits and pitfalls of timesheets. However, I feel that by using Microsoft Excel capabilities you can create a truly remarkable timesheet tracking tool and still leave your team members un-annoyed.
In this tutorial we will learn 3 things about timesheets and resource management using Excel
- How to setup a simple timesheet template in excel?
- How to make a more robust timesheet tracker tool in Excel?
- How to use the timesheet data to make a resource loading chart?
1. Make a Simple Excel Timesheet Template
According to Wikipedia, timesheets are used for
Timesheets may record the start and end time of tasks, or just the duration. It may contain a detailed breakdown of tasks accomplished throughout the project or program. This information may be used for payroll, client billing, and increasingly for project costing, estimation, tracking and management.
By defining a simple and straight forward template in Excel and using it to track time (or efforts) in your projects, you can easily consolidate the data, compare efforts and make any necessary analysis.
At its simplest form, the timesheet is nothing but list of team members and list of activities in a matrix. Look at the below example:
You can easily create such template in excel.
2. A More Robust Excel Timesheet Tracker
While the time sheet format shown in the above section is good, it is a wrong format if you need to analyze the timesheet entries of a 100 member project. Also in large projects usually members do few activities at a time. That means the above format (in section 1) will result in a sparse matrix.
Using a tracker log format is much more convenient to both record and analyze timesheet entries. Look at the example below:
We can use excel features like data validation drop downs, shared workbooks to make the timesheet entry and management a breeze.
3. Create a Resource Loading Chart – Project Management
Resource loading charts are a good way to show how busy the team members are in a project. At the outset the resource loading chart is nothing but a heatmap.
Look at an example resource loading chart below:
You can make a resource loading chart in MS Excel by following the below steps:
- The pre-condition for the resource loading chart is that we have clear data available to make one. This is where the robust timesheet tracker shown in section 2 of this post comes handy.
- First create a blank table in excel with team member names in first column and week numbers in first row. (Please note, you can make other types of resource loading charts by changing the Row and Column headers. For eg. You can show resource loading by Project and Team member)
- Assuming we have the time sheet data in the format shown in Section 2,
- Assuming “log_member_names” refers to the member name column and log_weeknum refers to the last column in the timesheet, we can write a simple COUNTIFS formula like this =COUNTIFS(log_member_names, “John Galt”, log_weeknums, 3)
- Once we calculate values for all team members using the above formula, we can apply conditional formatting to make the heat map. In Excel 2016 / 365, this is one step.
- That is all.
Download the Excel Timesheet & Resource Loading Chart Templates
You can download the excel time sheet template, timesheet tracker log template and resource loading chart template from here. Click the below links:
- If you have Excel 2016 / 365 or 2007 or above, download the .xlsx template
- If you have Excel 2003 and earlier, download the .xls template
- Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel
What Next?
Timesheets are a great way to understand how the effort is spent. Even though project estimation models have become more and more effective, still lots of projects are overshooting budgets and timelines. And this is where timesheets can help you as a manager. While estimation looks in to future, timesheets look at past. Timesheets give feedback to your estimation models. This can help you in making better estimates in future.
In the next installment of this series, learn about tracking issues and risks using excel spreadsheets.
If you are new to the series, please read the first 3 parts as well.
- Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts
- Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
- Project Status Reporting – Create a Timeline to display milestones
- While at it, also check out the bonus post about Burn Down Charts.
Resources for Project Managers
Check out my Project Management using Excel page for more resources and helpful information on project management.
Your thoughts and suggestions?
What are your ideas about timesheets using excel? Does your organization use excel as a way to manage timesheets or do you use some time tracking software? What is the granularity of detail captured in timesheets? As a project manager, what use do you find in time sheet data?
Share your ideas and experiences using comments.
*PS: If you are wondering what the heck TPS reports are, then you are spending way too much time with Excel buddy. And while at it, you missed the greatest comedy of all time. Go watch office space, now!
PPS: the TPS report image is from wikipedia.
32 Responses to “Extract Numbers from Text using Excel VBA [Video]”
Interesting that you are posting this at the same time as Doug http://yoursumbuddy.com/regex-function-sum-numbers-string/
Looks like two different articles about two different subjects, extracting numbers in text vs. summing all the numbers in text. Also, articles are published 20 days apart. Is the interesting part that there were two articles written about Visual Basic techniques within this month?
Sorry, that should have said 1 day, not 20. Was looking at the wrong thing. I still think it's just a nice coincidences to have multiple articles about VB written. Dick Kusleika also routinely writes about VB at dailydoseofexcel.com
What a lucky coincidence. I know about Doug's blog, but havent had a chance to read it in a while. Thanks for sharing the link.
I think that the best lesson that can come from the several salary survey solutions is that one should have anticipated the variety of monetary units. If the survey utilized drop down currency lists and limited the salary field to whole numbers only, etc. the resulting input would have been far cleaner. Sorry, Chandoo, but the messy input was, in my opinion, self-inflicted.
You are right. Since there are more than 200 different currencies, I thought a currency field would complicate the survey. The bigger problem was, Google Docs (which I used for survey) does not have an option to capture only numbers. Input fields were by text, so people entered in lots of different formats.
But I am happy how it turned out. It taught me several lessons on how to clean data.
Next time I will use a better tool to capture such responses.
Your post made me check how the "regular" and "irregular" decimal separators look like in different countries and it appears to be really interesting case. Take a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark
Cheers.
I am pretty sure you can replace this code block from your article...
If Text Like "*.*,*" Then
european = True
Else
european = False
End If
with this single line of code...
european = Format$(0, ".") = ","
Just to follow up on my previous post, I think I may have misunderstood the intent of your code. You were not looking to see if the computer system was using a dot for the decimal point, rather, you were looking to see if the Text was using a dot as the decimal point, weren't you? If so, then you could use this single line of code as to replace your If..Then..Else block...
european = Text Like "*.*,*"
But what if the number in Text was not large enough to display a thousands separator? Or what if it were a whole number? In either of those cases your original test, and my replacement for it, will fail. Maybe this would be a better test...
european = Right(Format$(Text, "."), 1) = ","
You are right. I am checking if the text has European format. And I loved your one line shortcut. I did not think of using LIKE in such context. Thanks for sharing that.
Again, you are right that this method would fail if the number is not big enough for a thousands separator. Since my data has annual salaries, all numbers are usually in thousands. So I did not think about it.
Hi ,
I have a question please. I'm working on a report that has alphanumeric on it and I only need to retrieve 7 integers that starts with 7 and 3 example SCM RIS PX RIS 02 - 7152349, ADSF\243434134, CM532345 and i need to get the 7152349. Can you please help me on this? I truly appreciate your help!
Thank you very much!
Hi-
The post was wonderful. Please take a look at this function also
Function ExtractNumber(InputString As String) As String
'Function evaluates an input string character by character
' and returns numeric only characters
'Declare counter variable
Dim i As Integer
'Reset input variable
ExtractNumber = ""
'Begin iteration; repeat for the length of the input string
For i = 1 To Len(InputString)
'Test current character for number
If IsNumeric(Mid(InputString, i, 1)) Then
'If number is found, add it to the output string
ExtractNumber = ExtractNumber & Mid(InputString, i, 1)
End If
Next i
End Function
Thank you so much. Your function code is amazing. It very useful for my lesson. Thank you so much.
To be more international.
At the beginning, for the rench format :
If fromThis.Value Like "*.*,*" Or fromThis.Value Like "* *,*" Then
european = True
End If
And at the end :
ElseIf ltr = "," And european And Len(retVal) > 0 Then
retVal = retVal & Application.DecimalSeparator
End If
Hi Chandoo,
Sorry, but your code does not work correctly with my Hungarian excel. My decimal separator is "," so
getNumber = CDbl(retVal)
will not convert the string to value, because you hard-coded "." as separator.
And, as you mentioned: "method would fail if the number is not big enough for a thousands separator" I would like to add: would fail if the user did not enter the thousand separator and also would fail if the thousand separator is not "," nor "." but " " (space chr) - as in Hungary.
This two functions could help to determine the system settings:
application.DecimalSeparator
application.ThousandsSeparator
Conclusion:
you say: "We do not need special treatment for regular format (61,000.30) as Excel & VBA are capable of dealing with these numbers by default." - it is true in case you system uses the regular format. 🙂
Cheers,
Kris
Awesome! It works !!
But how does one take into account negative numbers (say the list has negative numbers and I want to retain those negative numbers)
Thanks.
Hi. When I download this example, my excel is not showing formulas exactly. I wanted a ready version of this example, please. Thank you
Hi Chandoo,
Thanks for this brilliant article like many others that you have written for the benefit of many. Unfortunately, I am constantly having problems downloading your sample workbooks. I am currently using Excel 2007, and each time I try to download any of your sample workbooks, for e.g. the 'Extract Numbers Using VBA workbook', I get the following message 'This file is not in a recognizable format'.
I always get this message each time I try to download any of your sample workbooks. Please kindly advise me on how to resolve this.
Thank you.
Kenny
I have numbers like 12345-12-1 which I want to extract from text strings. 12345 might be variable there as 123, 1234, 12345, 123456,1234567 or so. When I get that in other cell (Column) I should see multiple entries of similar numbers with - (hyphen). How to do that?
@Madhav
Assuming your data is in cell A1
=LEFT(A1,FIND("-",A1)-1)
Thanks Hui for your response. Thank you for your time to find potential solution for my problem.
I tried your formula but was not successful in using the same.
here is more clarification so that you/others could help me.
Column A has following in Cells A1 to A4.. could be long..
ABCD 12345-12-1 XYZ 9878-02-9
LMNOPQ 12345-12-1 STQ 789748-98-5
NFHFKDJFKDS 123-23-1, NDKANSD
A FDSAFNDS 12345-12-1, ASNDSAND
from such data I need to extract the number with hyphens
remove , immediately after the numbers, separate the numbers with spaces
Column B shall look like:
12345-12-1 9878-02-9
12345-12-1 789748-98-5
123-23-1
2345-12-1
2 separate strings (numbers) having hyphen (-) therein should be separated with space.
@Madhev
Have a look at a solution using a simple UDF
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zexf4t9tmxmt3m9/Get_Numbers.xlsm?dl=1
Thanks Hui that worked well with the examples I provided.
I should have given following type of example:
2-ABCD 12345-12-1 X-2-YZ 9878-02-9
in the above case I do not want to extract a number and hyphen which is connected to or is part of text string..
Can you please help me modify the code to ignore numbers and - with text string.?
Thanks in advance.
@Madhav
So what is the answer expected from
2-ABCD 12345-12-1 X-2-YZ 9878-02-9
Thanks for your interest and time Hui.
so when I have text like
2-ABCD 12345-12-1 X-2-YZ 9878-02-9 3-abc-4-efg in Cell A2
in B2 the answer should be only numbers with hyphens and no text with numbers or hyphens
12345-12-1 9878-02-9 OR
12345-12-1 some delimiter (, or 😉 9878-02-9
The logic I thought was (but unable to do)
1. remove all strings containing text (and - and numbers) and then extract only numbers containing hyphens
2. Extract numbers in only following format ( # is a digit below) and ignore numbers and hyphens in any other format
#######-##-#
######-##-#
#####-##-#
####-##-#
###-##-#
##-##-#
Hope this helps.
Why not just use the function =getNumber ?
=getnumber doesn't extract numbers with hyphens..
also need to ignore numbers and hyphens associated with text string
When I use this code that code give me error
cdb1 is not highlight can u explain me
@Deepak
It runs fine for me
Select the first line and Press F9 to set a stop point
goto a cell and edit the function and press Enter
Then you can step through the code when it runs using F8
report back what happens
HI,
How can we add spaces between numbers and removing decimals.
how can we make spaces in the reesult e.g 25 655 2335
Dear Team,
I need to extract number (cheque number) from a cell (some numbers may repeat that to be ignored),
Text is - :-Inward Clg Cheque 00992924 00992924,BD
Result should be - 992924
Kindly help in getting formula for this (please email the code or VBA Code)