First a quick personal update: There has been a magnitude 7.8 earth quake in NZ on 14th November 2016 early morning. It is centered in Kaikoura, which is about 250 km away from Wellington. We did feel several shakes and after shocks. It has been an interesting and often scary experience. But my family is safe. I feel very sad for the all the damage and the loss for families in NZ. If you suffered from this quake, My prayers and thoughts are with you.
Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question. He has school distance data, like below. He wants to know which is the closest school for each school.
There are a few ways to answer this question. Let’s examine two approaches – formulas & pivot tables and see the merits of both.
Formulas to find closest school
All the distance data is in a table named dist.
Assuming you have school names & types in cells H5, I5, we want to find out the closest school of any type and same type in adjacent columns, as shown below.
Let’s take a look at the formulas first. All of these are array formulas. So press CTRL+Shift+Enter after typing.
- J5: Closest School Distance (Any type): =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,dist[Distance]))
- K5: Closest School Name (Any type): =INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&J5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
- L5: Closest School Distance (Same type): =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,IF(dist[To Type]=I5,dist[Distance])))
- M5: Closest School Name (Same type): =INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&L5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
How do these formulas work?
Let’s examine them one at a time.
Closest School Distance (Any type)
Formula: =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,dist[Distance]))
How it works:
- We check if From school is same as the one in H5 and get the corresponding distances only.
- This will return a bunch of distances and FALSE values. Distances will be listed only for the schools that match H5, for all others, the IF() gives FALSE.
- We then pass this list to MIN formula to find the minimum distance.
As we are using arrays inside IF formula, we must press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
Related: Learn more about MAXIF & MINIF formulas.
Closest School Distance (Same type)
Formula: =MIN(IF(dist[From]=H5,IF(dist[To Type]=I5,dist[Distance])))
How it works:
- We check if From school is same as the one in H5 and if the [To Type] is same as I5 and get the corresponding distances only.
- This will return a bunch of distances and FALSE values. Distances will be listed only for the schools that match H5 and of type I5, for all others, the IF() gives FALSE.
- We then pass this list to MIN formula to find the minimum distance.
Finding the corresponding school name:
Once we know the minimum school distance, we just use array MATCH to find corresponding school number and get the name of the school with an INDEX().
=INDEX(dist[To],MATCH(H5&J5,dist[From]&dist[Distance],0))
As we are concatenating two lists in the MATCH formula, we need to press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to get correct results.
We use same logic to fetch school name for the distance in column L too.
Related: Learn about multi-condition lookups
Formula approach – comments
While the formula approach gives answers we want, it is very tricky to write these formulas. The MIN(IF(…)) structure is not easy to master.
As the formulas check entire data, they can be very slow on large sets.
Pivot table to find closest school
First create a pivot table from the dist table with below settings:
- Add From and From type to row labels area
- Add To and To type to column labels area
- Add distance to values area, summarize it by SUM
- Remove sub totals & grand totals
- Set up pivot in tabular layout
We get this.
At this stage, finding closest school gets easy. We simply use SMALL formula on each pivot table row to find 2nd smallest value (because smallest value is 0 and we should ignore it.) to get the distance. Finding school name is a simple matter of using INDEX + MATCH.
Of course, finding the distance for closest school of same type still requires using array version of SMALL with SMALL(IF(…)) structure. But this formula would be significantly faster as we don’t process all the 10000 rows of data.
Comments on Pivot Table approach
Pivot table approach simplifies the problem and helps us answer the questions faster. You can also apply conditional formatting on top of Pivot Table to instantly highlight closest school(s).
Download example workbook
Click here to download the closest school example workbook. Play with the formulas & pivot table to learn more. Examine the conditional formatting rules for some cool techniques.
How would you find the closest school?
By asking your neighbors, of course. Jokes aside, how would you find the closest school for a given school? Would you use formulas or pivot tables or some other approach? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Need to learn, here is your closest school
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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.