Howdy folks. Jeff here, bringing you a Public Service Announcement: Thanks to the magic of VBA , Structured PivotTable References are coming to a PivotTable near you!
Structured References for PivotTables? So what? Well, because PivotTables are the best bit of ‘old’ Excel, and Tables are the best thing about ‘new’ Excel, and it’s about time their strengths were brought together:
- Tables magically expand to accommodate anything you put in them. Even better, because of the automated Dynamic Named Ranges built into Tables – called Structured Table References – any Formulas, Charts, Data Validation lists, or conditional formatting formulas that point to that table will instantly be updated with the latest data. And any PivotTables that point to that table will automatically include the new data whenever you refresh them. (Read more here).
- PivotTables allow you to do serious yet effortless number crunching without the need for a single formula. Just as well, because the kinds of formulas you need to replicate what a PivotTable can do easily are often mind-bogglingly complex, and very resource intensive. So using a PivotTable instead of formulas means that people that inherit your spreadsheet are less likely to struggle to follow what you’re doing, and the spreadsheet is less likely to suffer from slow recalculation issues. (Although yes, you will have to refresh that PivotTable from time to time. But that’s a small price to pay.) But there’s a problem with PivotTables: they don’t have any kind of inbuilt Dynamic Named Ranges like Tables do. And so because their structure is very likely to change whenever new data is added or a user decides to filter or rearrange the order or number of field displayed, then any formulas that point at PivotTable ranges will have to be changed manually. (With the exception of a single cell in the Data area referenced by the GETPIVOTDATA() function). So PivotTables are great for getting a result, but lousy for passing on those results to other parts of your spreadsheet.
Who knows why MS haven’t already implemeted Structured Referencing for PivotTables. But why wait for Microsoft to get around to it. Let’s just do it ourselves!
Download the sample file to see my hand-built Structured PivotTable Referencing in action: DynamicPivotRanges_20141019 unprotected
Open it, enable macros, and you’ll see a PivotTable like this:
Now, click on the arrow to the right of the name box, and you’ll see this:
As you can see, in my implementation of Structured PivotTable References, the automatic name that gets generated is prefixed with the Sheet name for uniqueness and uses a period to separate the Sheetname, PivotTable name, and FieldName. So it differs slightly from the notation that Tables use. But it’s every bit as handy.
For instance, check out what happens when I start typing a formula somewhere:
Awesome: That’s pretty much the same kind of thing I get when I want to reference a Table:
Let’s see if it handles changes in the structure of a PivotTable, shall we? Here, the Pivot is filtered in such a way that only 5 rows of data are returned. I’ve selected the entire State region, so that you can see that this corresponds with the automatically generated Structured PivotTable Reference shown in the Name box:
If I change the City filter to include additional cities, then the data returned grows by a few rows, as you can see below. Check out how the Structured PivotTable Reference automatically updated to accommodate the extra rows:
…and if I change the layout of the PivotTable by bringing in a new field – such as the BloodType field shown below – then as you can see, the Structured PivotTable Reference picks up the change too, and recognizes that the State field has shifted to the right:
If you change the Sheet name, then the SheetName part of the Structured PivotTable References syntax get updated next time the Pivot gets refreshed. And if you change the PivotName, then that part of the Structured PivotTable References syntax gets updated immediately. Unfortunately the same doesn’t occur for changes to PivotField names. So if you change the name of a field, any formulas pointing at the associated Structured Reference will need to be updated. This is shown below:
So there you have it: a proof-of-concept implementation of Structured PivotTable References. I’ve been using this to create complicated non-PivotCharts from Pivots, such as ScatterPlots (which are not supported in PivotCharts), or to serve up data labels to non-Pivot charts. And also to avoid having to have lots of extra formulas down the side of my PivotTable just to handle growth.
Take it for a spin, and let me know your thoughts and suggestions for improvements in the comments. Who knows…someone at Microsoft might even see this, and think “Now why didn’t WE think of that?”
What other functionality is missing from Excel that you’d like to see added?
While the things that Excel can do are cool, Excel often makes us jump through an awful lot of hoops – and click through an awful lot of dialog boxes – in order to actually do them. At the same time, there’s lots of things we routinely do that Excel simply doesn’t provide tools handy tools for. The end result is this: for every millisecond that Excel actually does some real work, we’ve probably spent hours ‘prepping’ it to do it.
Whenever we have to do lots of manual steps in order to leverage Excel’s cool inbuilt functionality, then Excel is programming us. It’s like some kind of epic experiment in behavioral psychology; and we’re the mice. It should be the other way around.
Fortunately, VBA (Macros) gives us the means to program Excel so that it behaves like we want it too. So if there’s something you would like to see added to Excel, let us know in the comments. We’ll see what we can collectively do to make Excel even greater than it already is!
—Edit—
My pal Doug Glancy actually wrote a post on how to do this back in 2012, on my birthday no less. I’d clean forgotten about that post. So be sure to check out Doug’s implementation of this too.
About the author
Yep, that’s me all right. Jeff Weird. Excel Madman.
If you liked this post, then you’ll love my upcoming book: Excel for Superheroes and Evil Geniuses. Keep a lookout for it in early 2015, and check out my posts on this blog or over at Daily Dose of Excel to get a feel for what kinds of things I’ll be covering. The book will give users an excellent overview of how Excel works under the covers, and what tools the interface puts at their fingers right out of the box. And it will ship with free code that will add amazing new features and functionality to Excel. You’ll be an Excel Evil Genius in no time!
Stay tuned…
22 Responses to “Formula Forensic No 019. Converting uneven Text Strings to Time”
Why not let the TIME function take care of the math:
=TIME(LEFT(TEXT(A1,"000000"),2),MID(TEXT(A1,"000000"),3,2),RIGHT(TEXT(A1,"000000"),2))
I was going to point out the same thing, except to note that useing the time function and doing the divide method are not interchangeable.
I have spent hours investigating a spreadsheet working with a couple of years worth of hourly data, and found that the reason things weren't working is because the rounding on the divide method is only close to the correct time values. In order to have it work for comparisons, (like sub-totaling by time value, or pivoting) you MUST use the TIME function.
Great use of the TEXT function, Hui. I will be using this concept for sure.
Why not just.
=TEXT(A1,"00\:00\:00")*1
Regards
Elegant!
Hi Elias,
I tried to use your formula. But, it doesn't seem to work for me. I am getting an error message "The formula you typed contains an error". It seems I have the problem in using \: in the format. How can I overcome this?
Thanks
Manick, it isn't the /: that causes the problem. If you copy/paste it, you're getting “'s instead of the actual quotation marks that Excel uses. Change the quotation marks by deleting from the pasted formula and retype them.
Hi Manick...
use this alternate formula :
=1*TEXT(A1,"00"":""00"":""00")
note twice double quote each side of :
@Manick,
Did you copy the formula and pasted in Excel or did you typed? Also, do you use , or ; as separator of arguments?
Regards
@Elias: I had no problem using your formula, in fact, I have used your method to convert a number such as 20120419 to an Excel date using =TEXT(A1,"0000\/00\/00")*1. Thanks for posting.
@Joe: For date convertion you can use this as well.
=TEXT(A1,"00-00-00")*1
Regards
Sweet! It appears this also works with =TEXT(A1,"0-00-00")*1. I come from the old days when you counted every byte. I also like to try an make formulas as small as possible for the fun of it 🙂
Elias's suggestion is the simplest, but here is yet another way with TIME and MOD functions...
=TIME(MOD(A2/10000,100),MOD(A2/100,100),MOD(A2,100))
Since the seconds appear to always be 0, why not simply the input to minutes and above and save yourself the trouble of typing those zeroes...
0 => 0:00
1 => 1:00
10 => 10:00
100 => 1:00:00
etc.
Then just use this formula...
=TEXT(A1,"0\:00\:")*1
@ Rick, the numbers to convert are no typed, they are imported. Then your formula will return the wrong result.
Regards.
Hmm! My formula lost some backslash-zero combinations (two of them to be exact). The formula was supposed to be this...
=TEXT(A1,"0\:00\:\zero\zero")*1
where the words "zero" should actually be the number 0. Another way to write the formula is this...
=TEXT(A1,"0\:00\:""00""")*1
Hi Master,
While writing the formulae you have considered only upto "seconds factor" . I think you should take the centi-seconds factor also to achieve best results. Please look into it and rectify the problem...?
For Example.
In horse racing timings are noted in minute, seconds and centi-seconds, like if a horse finished in 70 seconds over a scurry of 1200 metres, is noted as 1.10 min. Nowadays it is noted in centi-seconds everywhere, like 70.00 if you want to convert it to centi seconds (should multiply by 100) = 7000 centi seconds. If you put this figure into your formula as a general number (7000) it will return as 1:10:00. As per your formula, it should be taken as 1 hour 10 seconds 0 minutes. However for a racing enthusiast like me it can be taken as 1 minute 10 seconds also.
Just look what happens if we race goers use this figure as 7000 centi seconds in your formulae, it will correctly show as 1 minute 10 seconds(?) Suppose a horse finishing over a 1200m in 70.60 seconds or in racing terms written as 1.10.60 mins, where 1 minute 10 seconds, & 60 centi-seconds can be counted as 7060, if you put this figure in the formula it will return as 1 minute 11 seconds, that is correct.
My point is if you can incorporate Centi Seconds in the formulae, it would be of great help to us also.
Thanks and regards.
Rajagopal (Mumbai)
Awesome techniques !
I tried with 235960 just to see if it will fail but this is great.
Although a little longer, this too work:
=CHOOSE(LEN(A2);A2/(24*3600);A2/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;1)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;2)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;1)/24 + MID(A2;2;2)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600);LEFT(A2;2)/24 + MID(A2;3;2)/(24*60) + RIGHT(A2;2)/(24*3600))
Converting uneven Text Strings to Time I have imported some data that comes in as a number that I need to convert to h:mm.
Just come across this while googling
find interesting challenge and come up with this
=TEXT(TEXT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,RIGHT(A1,1),""),"000000"),"00\:00\:00")
I need to convert a string of numbers representing average minutes, to reflect correct time values. For example, the numbers below currently represent 5.79 minutes, 15.82 minutes, etc.
I need to convert these values to their correct corresponding value within time parameters. So 5.79 would be something close to 5 minutes and 45 seconds.
5.79
15.82
3.92
12.40
6.70
3.62
I know there has to be a way to compute this in Excel, it can do anything, I believe!
Thank you for any and all assistance~
@Renee... You can use a formula like this. Assuming A1 has the minutes.seconds,
=INT(A1) + MOD(A1, 1)*0.6
If you want to see it in 5 minutes 45 seconds format, use
=INT(A1) & " mins " & ROUND(MOD(A1, 1)*0.6,2) & " secs"