Do you want to lookup in any column and return the result? Something like this:
In this article, learn how to write necessary Excel formulas to get the result.
Data Setup for looking up in any column
You need to set up your data in below structure. One column with the data you want to get and multiple columns with potential lookup value. For example, team name in column C, member names in columns D:J, as depicted below.
Lookup formula:
Let’s say we want to lookup “Leonard”, who is in the tea “Geeky Group”. Here is the formula.
=XLOOKUP(1,BYROW(D5:J13,LAMBDA(row,COUNTIFS(row,"Leonard"))),C5:C13)
'notes:
'D5:J13 contains team member names
'C5:C13 contains team names
'this will return #N/A if none of the teams contain lookup value - ie LeonardHow does this formula work?
To understand how this lookup in any column formula is working, we need to first understand a few Excel concepts.
- BYROW: This function let’s you define logic or operations that apply consistently for each row of the data. As we want to look in each row of team members and see if any of them is “Leonard”, BYROW is perfect for this operation.
- LAMBDA: We can use Excel’s LAMBDA functions to create custom logic. As we need to check each row of the data to see if any of the members are “Leonard”, I created a LAMBDA to do that operation. LAMBDA(row, COUNTIFS(row, “Leonard”)) will return the count of “Leonard” in the input variable row
So now that you have the basic concepts ready, let’s understand the lookup in any column function. Here is the formula again.
=XLOOKUP(1,BYROW(D5:J13,LAMBDA(row,COUNTIFS(row,"Leonard"))),C5:C13)
'notes:
'D5:J13 contains team member names
'C5:C13 contains team names
'this will return #N/A if none of the teams contain lookup value - ie Leonard- BYROW(D5:J13,LAMBDA(row,COUNTIFS(row,”Leonard”))): This formula portion tells us how many times “Leonard” appeared in each row of the data. It will be 0 if the team doesn’t contain lookup value and 1(or more) if the team contains the lookup value. For our sample data, this would be {0;0;0;0;0;1;0;0;0}
- XLOOKUP(1, BYROW(…), C5:C13): Now that we know which team has the lookup value (Leonard), we just lookup for 1 (count) in the BYROW output and return the corresponding team name from the column C.
What if there are multiple matching values?
By default XLOOKUP returns the first matching value whenever we have multiple matches. If you want to see all team names for a given person name (for example Amy is in two teams – “Geeky Group” and “99 Not Out”.
In this case, we can use FILTER() function instead of XLOOKUP.
Using FILTER function to return all matching values
Here is the formula to see all team names for a given person.
=FILTER(C5:C13,BYROW(D5:J13="Amy",OR))
'notes:
'D5:J13 contains team member names
'C5:C13 contains team names
'Here we are using an advanced variation of BYROW that applies OR operation on every row of comparison directly. The end result would be a bunch of TRUE or FALSE values, TRUE for teams that contain "Amy" and FALSE for rest of the rows.This formula uses an advanced variation of the BYROW by doing a comparison directly and applying OR operation on each row of comparison. The result of BYROW would be an array of TRUE or FALSE values. TRUE for rows which contain Amy and FALSE for the rest.
When FILTER(C5:C13 …) sees this array of TRUE/FALSE values, it would return the matching items from C5:C13 for all TRUE values.
In this case, the output is shown below.
Further reading:
If you want to understand how the inner parts of this formula are working, refer to below articles / videos.
- How to use XLOOKUP function in Excel
- BYROW explained with examples
- What is LAMBDA function in Excel
- How to use FILTER function in Excel
- FILTER function in Excel – Video
Limitations of both formulas
Both of the above approaches (XLOOKUP and FILTER) only work with Excel 365 as BYROW is only available in that version of Excel. If you are using an older version of Excel (such as 2024, 2019 or 2016) you can’t use these approaches.
Alternative formula for older version of Excel
There is no alternative for the FILTER() approach as older versions of Excel are not capable of spilling values. But there is an alternative to XLOOKUP() approach of returning the first matching value by looking up any column.
Here is the formula:
=INDEX($C$5:$C$13,MATCH(1, MMULT((D5:J13="Leonard")*1,TRANSPOSE(COLUMN(D5:J13)^0)),0))
'notes:
'D5:J13 contains team member names
'C5:C13 contains team namesUsing MMULT to mimic BYROW operation
Most of the above formula is easy to understand, but the bit with MMULT is the confusing part. So let me explain. Here is the MMULT portion: MMULT((D5:J13=”Leonard”)*1,TRANSPOSE(COLUMN(D5:J13)^0))
- (D5:J13=”Leonard”) checks every cell of the team member data and returns a bunch of TRUE or FALSE values. TRUE when the cell value is “Leonard” and FALSE otherwise. This is how that output looks like:
- (D5:J13=”Leonard”)*1 turns this boolean array into a bunch of 0s & 1s (0 = false and 1 = true). So the output at this point would be:
- COLUMN(D5:J13) would return the the column numbers for columns D to J. This would be an array of {4,5,6,7,8,9,10}
- TRANSPOSE(COLUMN(D5:J13) turns these numbers into a row-wise array. So the net result at this point is {4;5;6;7;8;9;10}
- TRANSPOSE(COLUMN(D5:J13)^0 takes all these numbers and makes them 1s as any number raised to the power of 0 would be. We just need a row-wise array of 1s same size as the number of columns in the team member array. So this is a long-winded way of getting there as older versions of Excel don’t have SEQUENCE formula. At this stage, our second part of MMULT operation has this array: {1;1;1;1;1;1;1}
- Now, MMULT just multiplies these two matrices. Here they are again:
- When the matrix multiplication is done, we end up with a vertical (row-wise) array of 0s and 1s. 0 when the row doesn’t contain the lookup value (Leonard) and 1 otherwise. The result of this multiplication is:
Let’s put everything together
So now that we know how the MMULT magic is working, let’s put all the pieces together.
=INDEX($C$5:$C$13,MATCH(1, MMULT((D5:J13="Leonard")*1,TRANSPOSE(COLUMN(D5:J13)^0)),0))
'notes:
'D5:J13 contains team member names
'C5:C13 contains team namesINDEX($C$5:$C$13,MATCH(1, MMULT(…), 0)) simply looks for a 1 in the MMULT result and returns the corresponding value from range C5:C13.
Further reading on older Excel formulas:
Please refer to below pages for further learning on these formula techniques.
- INDEX + MATCH formula in Excel – explanation
- SUMPRODUCT explained
- How to use boolean operations with arrays in Excel
- MMULT examples
Example Workbook: Lookup in any column
If you need a practice file to understand these formulas better, download it here.
In conclusion
While Excel’s lookup functions (XLOOKUP, VLOOKUP, FILTER, INDEX+MATCH) are great, they all suffer from one nagging limitation. They can only lookup in one place at a time (ie one column or row). But most of the time, our business data is not so tidy. We get data that can span multiple columns. In such cases, using the BYROW() to process one row at a time and then applying lookup or filter logic is a great alternative.
Moreover, if your data is structured vertically (ie team members are listed in rows instead of columns), we can use the same approach with BYCOL function. It applies the logic by column.
The BY functions (BYROW and BYCOL) are great addition to Excel and should be part of every analyst’s toolkit. Using them solves many tricky data problems easily.
49 Responses to “Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report using Excel [Part 6 of 6]”
[...] 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 [...]
Excellent!
I was looking forward to this and you've done it again...Shame I can't claim it was all my own work 😉
ps hope you're getting enough sleep
Excelent !!! Tks to share your knowledge with us.
Izabel
Sao Paulo - Brazil
Nice job!.
I'm also keen on PM Excel Dashboards. Please, take a look at
http://screencast.com/t/TyaxH5r4mDf
That's one example of my Project control Spreadsheets.
Cheers
Hi Miguel,
Do you share your PM Excel Dashboards? It looks awesome.
Regards,
Germán
Hi M. Miguel,
Can you share your Excel Dashboards? Awesome work BTW.
Regards,
Michel Levesque
Can you share the PM excel template?
[...] haired Dilbert hat zum Abschluss einer Artikeserie zum Thema Projektmanagement mit Excel eine Anleitung zum Bau eines Projekt-Dashboards veröffentlicht. Ein Dashboard ist eine Visualisierungsform für große Mengen von meist [...]
Quite a nice and helpful article. I am sure excel is one of the most used application across many many big companies. And your info on project status update using excel would surely be usefull. Keep up the good work on this blog site. Also to share there are some open source flash-based graphing and charting solution which caould also be used on any project..
http://askwiki.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-create-quality-charts-using.html
@Alex, Izabel .. thank you 🙂
@Miguel: Thank you. Your dashboard looks very good. It is inclined towards the budget and finances of the project. I have kept those aspects out of this series. May be I will revisit the financial aspect of projects at a later point.
@Rishil: Thank you. Yes, you can create flash based charts (or even simple image based charts) and embed them in a project dashboard that can be published to the team using intranet (like sharepoint). This is how large companies usually do it. Thanks for sharing the Askwiki article.
Great looking dashboard!! Do you have a version for the Mac versions of Office available?
Thanks
Chandoo,
this is great piece of collating info.I liked it and shall try using it in office.
Thanks for the all hard work behind this.
Chandoo,
Kudos. This is really as simple as it gets for laymen. We did this sort of stuff in Consulting - but this can now become really simple for people. Will have my team look at this! Great work.
thanks,
Mrigank
[...] I suggest reading my 7 part series on project management using excel. Starting with Excel Gantt Charts to Project Dashboards. [...]
Just downloaded the project management template bundle...great!
Have you done anywork on a Project Portfolio Dashboard template?
@Bw... Thanks for getting a copy of the templates. 🙂 I have worked on few assignments where we built such templates. But these are similar to other regular dashboard templates. I will share some of these ideas in a later post someday. Meanwhile if you have any ideas on how to structure project portfolio dashboard, let me know using comments or email.
[...] to display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
[...] display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Part 5: Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
[...] to display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
Thanks fro the great ideas! To get a sense of the layout and design of a Dashboard more geared toward Cost and Schedule anaysis, check out the example Dashboard at http://www.ProjectDashboards.com which was built entirely in excel.
hey,
i just need a simple Chart where by i can show some of the projects by % wise. no dates required.
1st column Project name and 2nd column will be status (filled with %). can you pls help me out.
Thanks.
@DS... if you have excel 2007, you can use data bars in conditional formatting for this purpose.
Hi Chandoo - this series is an excellent resource and tutorial, thank you for sharing.
When I sat down to consider what my dashboard should look like, one of the most important features for me is to be able to maintain version control and to show simply on what version is on display.
Apart from the naming convention of the file name, is there a good way to do this within a dashboard? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts!
@Larph: Welcome 🙂
> You can do version control thru Macros (but always remember that your audience can disable macros)
> Another option is to use a static time stamp / version number in the title page of dashboard that you update manually whenever you make changes to the file
> In excel 2010, you can keep track of file versions from File menu. This can be used to select a previous version of dashboard.
> Best option is to use a version control system like SVN or upload files to Sharepoint or something like that. This will take care of versioning for you (although it is a bit technical and dashboard audience may have difficulty figuring the versions out).
> The easiest option is to use filenames and the CELL() formula to get the version number (or date) from the filename so you can show it on the dashboard.
Hi Chandoo... I'm following you from Brazil...
I would like to thank you for the tips about excel, mainly with dashboards ... It helped me a lot …
Take care...
Di
On the dashboard when I print, the text is blanked out in the middle of the Issues list - suggestions on how to fix?
[...] Project Management Dashboard in Excel [...]
Hi Chandoo, do you have an equivalent Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report for MS Office 2010?
As a Microsoft trainer I'm interested in your choice of Excel for project management. I'm assuming that you've tried Microsoft Project and have decided not to use it? We get folks on our MS Project courses who've tried to use Excel for PM purposes and none of them have made such an impressive project plan, but I wonder is it worth all the effort?
This looks very interesting. How may I be a part of this
Does this template work in Google Spreadsheets?
Many thanks for sharing your expertise with us. Keep up the good work 🙂
Heya i'm for the first time here. I came across this board and I to find It really helpful & it helped me out a lot. I am hoping to offer one thing again and aid others like you helped me.
Hi Chandoo,
Your PM dashboards impressed me so much that I've downloaded the Portfolio and Project Management package. All of the documents look very professional.
I was going through the Portfolio dashboard and I had a question.
When I enter in additional holidays they are highlighted in the gantt chart. Is it possible so that the name of the holiday shows up in the highlighted area of the gantt chart.
Thanks
Adam
[...] Project Status Dashboard [...]
[...] Project Status Dashboard in Excel [...]
[...] Project Management Dashboard in Excel [...]
can you confirm that the downloads will work on a mac - excel for mac v14.3.6
thanks
Made a slight variation on the schedule sheet,
1. Add a date column for start
2. In week column cell use =weeknum() and link to date cell
3. Hide week column
When you enter in a date for each task the week number is populated accordingly
simple but more effective, you can also dynamically link the date cell to your MSP project file for even more automation!!
I purchased a copy of the project management dashboard excel file. I misplaced the password to unlock the file and make modification. Can you please resend the password.
Thank much in advance...
Hi there! I just would like to give you a big thumbs up for your great info
you've got right here on this post. I'll be returning to your website
for more soon.
I bought ur project management template just want to know how to hide the budget section from portfolio?
Hi, Thanks - very good job you've prepared!
You've inspired me as well 🙂
Best regards
Hello!
I am using a gantt chart template which i got from your website. All is good just when I add all my acitivities in data spreadsheet and then go back to gantt chart to view them, I only see first 9 and then I need to keep scrolling for the next ones. is it possible to see most of the activities if not all in the single frame.
thanks for answering!
This is my first time pay a visit at here and i am actually happy to read all at alone place.
I am interested in your dashboard; downloaded the locked version, unable to use it...do you have a user guide that is available that I can see and use on the locked version?
Please send me daily newsletter
Hi,
I downloaded the PM dashboard and the gantt chart only has dates till the year 2016. How do I change this to include 2017 FY as well.
When I enter a activity for this year , it fails to show up on the chart.
Hi
Would.like to purchase the project management .kits
Pls share the payment link in INR
Also share your contact number to speak with you
Regards
Hari
9384825926