Denice, an Excel School student emailed me an interesting problem.
I have a bunch of data from which I want to find the sum of values that meet a criteria. But I also want to exclude any rows that are hidden.
Well, we know how to find sum of values that meet a criteria – we use either SUMIF, SUMIFS or SUMPRODUCT formula.
We also know how to find the sum of values while excluding hidden rows – we use SUBTOTAL Formula
But sum of values meeting a criteria and not in a hidden rows?!?
Of course, we can get such a total in excel, we just need to mash up SUBTOTAL Formula with SUMIFS (or SUMPRODUCT) and add a dash of coffee to it.
Step 1:Add an extra column to your data
Our first step is to find which rows are hidden and which are not. We can do this using SUBTOTAL Formula.
Assuming your data is in the range A2:B15
Add an extra column next to your data and write the formula =SUBTOTAL(102,B2). This formula will return “1” if cell B2 is visible and “0” if hidden.
Now drag the formula to fill rest of the cells in the extra column. At this point our data table should look like this:
Step 2 [Excel 2007+]: Write the SUMIFS Formula
Now, our summing criteria is very simple. We want to find the sum of all values where product=”Pod Gun” and Visible?=”1″
The formula is =SUMIFS(B2:B15.A2:A15,"Pod Gun",C2:C15,1)
If you do not get this formula, take a sip of that coffee and look long and hard it. If you need some clues, check out the Introduction to SUMIFS Excel Formula page.
Step 2 [All versions of Excel]: Write the SUMPRODUCT Formula
Just in case you do not have Excel 2007 or above, you have to write SUMPRODUCT formula instead of SUMIFS. Here is the formula:
=SUMPRODUCT((B2:B15)*(A2:A15="Pod Gun")*(C2:C15=1))
Again, take a sip, widen your eyes and try to gaze seriously at the pixels. Here is the Introduction to SUMPRODUCT Excel Formula page if you need help.
Step 3: Finish the coffee before it gets cold.
or if you are drinking cold coffee, finish it before it tastes funny.
Download Example Workbook:
Here is the example workbook. Download and play with it to learn.
Share your tips & experiences:
I use “hide rows” option almost regularly to remove un-necessary info. from view. But I never had the need to exclude the values in hidden rows from my formulas.
What about you? How have you handled similar problems before?
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.