This is a guest post by Sohail Anwar.
August 29, 1994. A day that changed my life forever. Football World Cup? Russia and China de-targeting nuclear weapons against each other? Anniversary of the Woodstock festival?
No, much bigger: Two Undertakers show up at WWE Summerslam for an epic battle. Needless to say: MIND() = BLOWN().
And thus begun one boy’s journey into understanding the phenomenon of Multiple Occurrences.
My journey continued, when just a few years later my grandfather handed me down a precious family heirloom: A few columns of meaningless data that I could take away and analyze in Excel. You may laugh but in the 90’s, every boy only wanted two things 1) Lists of pointless data and 2) To be as bad ass as this guy:
Ohhh yeah.
All good but how best to deal with multiple occurrences? Well, it broadly involves a cunning collusion of SMALL, LARGE, IF and our good friend the Array formula. To explain, let’s have a look at one of granddad’s prized pointless lists:
All kinds of repetition of names exist here, so how, for example, can we look up the pointless things about ‘Das Hoff’?
A typical VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH combo will give us the first entry (‘Talented’), but what about the rest? The following ARRAY formula will saves us:
SMALL(IF(Lookup Range = Lookup Value, Row(Lookup Range),Row ()-# of rows below start row of Lookup Range)
Entered with Ctrl + Shift + Enter because it’s an Array formula
In this case:
SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20=$E$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
Bear in mind this will give us the position numbers of the multiple occurrences in our main list. That’s a good start. Now we drag this formula down so we end up with another list since our need to find multiple occurrences will necessitate creating another shorter subset of the main list, even if there are just two entries. How far do we drag it down? It doesn’t matter too much but enough to capture the likely number of multiple occurrences. we’ll come back to this point in a bit.
I just want to bring your attention to the last part of our SMALL formula, in this case ROW()-2. This creates a rank; think of it as 1st occurrence, 2nd occurrence…as you are dragging the formula down.
Why did I put Row()-2? Well I placed it in a cell which is in the 3rd row and as a rule the first instance of the formula you write, you want the Row()-x to equal 1 (assuming your lookup range starts from row 1). So if your looukup range is in A1:D20 and your first SMALL formula is in cell E5 then you will write ROW()-4 at the end .
Let’s see what happens when we put the formula in E3, search for ‘Michael Bluth’ and drag down to E7:
We can visually see there are just two entries in the main list and their position numbers have come through nicely (4 and 7). Beyond that we are met with the #NUM! error. So from here, we need to do two things
- Utilize the position number to give us value or related value from the list (i.e. do what the lookup is supposed to do!)
- Conceal the errors.
To accomplish (1) we can just put this whole thing into an INDEX formula, define an array size (same vertical dimensions as our main table), use our SMALL formula to provide the row number, then define whatever column number we want, in this case we want column 2:
INDEX($B$1:$B$20,SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20=$E$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2),1)
Which yields:
Now, the final bit involves wrapping all this in our trusted friend IFERROR for some easy tidying up:
IFERROR(INDEX($B$1:$B$20,SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20=$E$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2),1),"")
Ta da! Let’s have a quick recap of how we evolved the formula.
What else can we do?
Let’s extend this bad boy formula and make it really work for us. Here are some select ways I have extended the Multiple Occurrence formula to help extract from challenging text data.
Please download the workbook, since it contains the examples for your learning pleasure.
Note: Temporarily for this next section, I am going to ignore the IFERROR and the INDEX parts purely to make the formula slighter shorter and thus a bit easier to read. Instead, what we will get are the position numbers (which are good enough to demonstrate how the formulas work). Relax, in the final section, I’ll bring them back in!
Descending List
Okay, not very exciting, but if we wanted our list to be in a descending order, we simply switch the SMALL with LARGE!
LARGE(IF($A$1:$A$20=$E$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
Partial Text Search
What if just want to look for part of the text? Easy!
SMALL(IF(IFERROR(SEARCH($G$2,$A$1:$A$20)>0,FALSE),ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
The urge to use a wildcard just won’t work due to the mechanism of an Array. Arrays require like for like comparisons and a partial text won’t correspond to a range. So we need to create TRUE and FALSE outputs, which is what wrapping the SEARCH(…)>0 in an IFERROR does.
Left side of Text
Let’s say we are looking for a first name in a cell with a full name, we can do:
SMALL(IF(LEFT($A$1:$A$20,LEN($I$2))=$I$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
Some of you are thinking, well this can be achieved with a partial text search and most of the time you are right. But I routinely deal with tens of thousands of rows of data with varying text and used to fall foul of not preparing for every permutation or combination. It’s subtle but it can be very useful.
Partial text in the right side
‘Now you’re just being silly Sohail! Who needs this?’ I’ll stand by what I said, when you work with lots of data and need to extract all kinds of things, this sort of formula soon finds a place! Unfortunately I can’t reproduce data that I’ve worked with to show you the reality of needing something like this. It’s not often but once in a while it comes and it’s quicker then VBAing!
SMALL(IF(IFERROR(SEARCH($K$2,RIGHT($A$1:$A$20,LEN($A$1:$A$20)-SEARCH(" ",$A$1:$A$20)))>0,FALSE),ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
So we’re just searching for things past the first space, this sort of thing would need to be extended as more spaces crop up but you get the point.
Multiple Occurrences and Multiple Criteria!
What?! This is more confusing than making Time Traveling Flux Capacitors.
Okay, to make this work, let’s increase our data set, I’m going to throw in a region column for all the patriots in da house.
So now things are getting interesting. ‘Das Hoff’ is a great example; we can see from a visual inspection he covers two regions (discussing the dual German and US citizenship of the Hoff is out of the scope of this article, but just know how awesome he is!). How can we lookup the two different occurrences of ‘Das Hoff’?
Easy, but first if we harken back to the ultimate VLOOKUP trick I suggested the use of CHOOSE in an array to create ‘virtual’ helper columns, the good news is since we are in an Array format, its pretty straightforward do this without messing with VLOOKUP or CHOOSE. So we simply concatenate the Person and Region ranges and we concatenate the Person and Region lookup cells:
=SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20&$B$1:$B$20=$E$2&$F$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
So now if we look up ‘Das Hoff’ in ‘Germany’ and ‘US’ we get:
Das ist gut, nein? Ja, Über gut.
Let’s go a step further; what if we wanted to separately lookup the First and Last names? Easy, same concatenation but also concatenate a space in between, like so:
=SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20=$K$2&" "&$L$2,ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2)
So if we are searching for the first name ‘Thom’ and surname ‘Morello’ we get:
There you have it. Multiple Occurrences WITH Multiple Lookups, take that to the bank!
Autofiltering without an Autofilter!
So, now we have seen the power of what can be done with Multiple Occurrences, how else might we use this in our work? Well, in the Chandoo tradition of creating awesome dashboards let’s build a bit of interactivity in a dashboard. Now I’m not going to build a dashboard, the web’s finest materials on dashboards can already be found on Chandoo.org! No point me recreating. What if we want to create a makeshift Autofilter in the middle of a dashboard/report? We can use everything we’ve learned about Multiple Occurrences and with a bit of conditional formatting we can cook up something pretty decent.
How about we poach the multiple criteria technique from the previous section: First Name, Surname and also Region as drop downs (by using simple data validation lists) to control a table of formulas:
Let’s just look at the formula in each column of the table:
Column 1: Person
IFERROR(INDEX($A$1:$C$20, SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20&$B$1:$B$20=$F$3&" "&$F$4&$F$5, ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2),1),"")
Column 2: Region
IFERROR(INDEX($A$1:$C$20, SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20&$B$1:$B$20=$F$3&" "&$F$4&$F$5, ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2),2),"")
Column 3: Pointless Thing
IFERROR(INDEX($A$1:$C$20, SMALL(IF($A$1:$A$20&$B$1:$B$20=$F$3&" "&$F$4&$F$5, ROW($A$1:$A$20)),ROW()-2),3),"")
The only difference between these is the Column number in the INDEX formulas. Now, I am fully aware of the absurdity of having your search criteria (Name and Region) appear in the results table but it’s cool, I’m just illustrating with minimal pointless made up data. Let’s try using this:
Selecting Thom, Yorke and UK gives us a nice chunky result. And how did we get it looking so slick with expanding/contracting borders and alternating colored rows?! Easy, let’s take a closer look at the conditional formatting:
Pay close attention to the order of the conditions, it won’t work properly otherwise. The formulas used are:
For the first condition, I have selected ‘No Color’ for fill:
For the second condition, the formula is:
=NOT(MOD(ROW(),2)) – Choose a white fill AND complete Border around the cell.
For the last condition, the formula is:
=AND(MOD(ROW(),2)=1,H3<>"")
The last thing is to turn the grid-lines off or at least paint the cells in and around the table white. Have a look in the workbook if it doesn’t make sense.
Download Example Workbook
Click here to download Multiple Occurrences workbook. It contains all the examples. Play with the formulas to learn more.
Conclusions
So there you go. I hope you have taken away a number of things about the value of extracting multiple occurrences from a list and a technique for enhancing interactive reporting. If there is one thing I really wanted to convey during this article, its how much I love the Hoff and we can never have enough occurrences of this Germanic demigod. If you enjoyed this article then please share it and let’s get a discussion going in the comments to see what other multiple occurrence madness we can come up with!
Added by Chandoo
Thank you so much Sohail for another wonderful, intelligent & useful article. I had loads of fun reading & learning from it.
If you enjoyed this, please say thanks to Sohail in the comments section.
Keen to learn Advanced Formulas?
Check out Formula Forensics & Array Formula pages.
About the author: Sohail Anwar is a Londoner who has spent over 10,000 hours applying Excel in his professional life and earns well over 6 figures as a result. Now he is on a mission to teach professionals how to massively increase their earnings by learning and applying Excel like never before. Find out more about Sohail on Earnwithexcel and connect with him on LinkedIn.
33 Responses to “Show Months & Years in Charts without Cluttering”
Very CooOOOoool 🙂
Would it work if I merely change the display format for the dates, or do they actually need to be retyped in that format (Nov, Dec, etc)?
ps- it's only about 34 donuts per month, or slightly more than 1 per day. Yum!
To make it work automatically when you create a chart, delete the labels above the Year and Month columns, but keep the label above the Y data (Donuts). The blank cells tell Excel that the first row and first two columns (indicated by the blanks) are special, so it uses the first row for series names an the first two columns for X axis labels.
This is better than the other kind of donut chart, but you'll soon be carrying a big donut around your midsection.
First off, thank you Chandoo for being respectful and taking out the "Jesus" comment. Not that I'd threaten to kill you, or start world-wide riots, or make you go into hiding if you didn't (as OTHERS would; wink, wink, nudge, nudge)... I just really appreciate your respectulness and consideration; so thank you. I was meaning to write you about it, but when I came to your site you'd already made the edit... so again, thank you!
Secondly, I wanna say I think there's an easier way to do what you are demonstrating. I've got a pivot chart with months of data and all I had to do was right-click the x axis and then select "format axis", under "Axis Options" there's a check-box that says "Multi-level Category Labels". The chart I was able to do this on was a pivotchart however so maybe it wouldn't be that easy for a non-pivotchart.
Anyway, love the site. Keep up the good work. Thanks also for being so open about your success, it's very encouraging and motivating.
God (aka Jesus) Bless. 🙂
Hi Chandoo - great site! Another option to save space is to simply rotate the orientation of the text by 90 degrees, so the dates read vertical rather than horizontal. However, I like the elegance of your solution also.
Hey Chandoo -- Great tip. Only yesterday I was working through some strange behaviour with formatting dates in PivotCharts. Seems the axes never want to cooperate. This is a neat and elegant solution I hadn't thought of using. May need to abandon pivotcharts to use formulas like that, but if we use dynamic named ranges, no big sacrifice.
BTW, whatever did you do to get your site blocked in China? Never heard of regime change by a grass-root spreadsheet movement. Maybe your ISP is hosting some problem sites. Chandoo.org is certainly worth it for me to fire up the VPN, but I'm sure you would lose a lot of other visitors from the middle kingdom.
Chandoo ... pls help.. the link is blocked over here... pls can you put the regular link... 🙂
@JP... Excel Axis formatting is linked to cell formatting by default. So you can just have the dates which are formatted to look like months (mmm).
@Erin: It was not my intention to mock anyone's faith or religion. I just used the word as it is quite common. I decided to remove it as I got 2 emails from readers requesting for the same.
Also, the pivot charts take pivot table groupings by default, so you need not do any of the above while making charts from pivot tables.
@Kein: I am not sure why Chinese authorities decided to block my site. I wish they would actually look at the content instead of blocking sites based on simple text matching rules.
@Kapil: The file is mirrored here: http://chandoo.org/img/d/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls
Cool, really cool...
Nice one Chandoo,
Also would like to mention abt useful method while creating dynamic charts.
In any chart where in the months keep on adding - instead of changing the range for the chart every time we add a month, we can actually format the months as dates (probably 1st of every month) still keep the format as "mmm" AND while selecting the data, we can select a huge rows (date column) once and for all, and the chart adjusts automatically with the data that we entered. So next month when I enter Dec's data, I need not change the source data of the chart, however it automatically adjusts.
Hope I made sense.!
Regards,
SS
Thanks, Chandoo! This is a great tip - one that I will definitely put to use. I typically have an axis with mmm yy format, aligned vertically, but this will definitely look a bit cleaner (except in cases where the chart is too small for the axis labels to be displayed horizontally, even without the mmm yy on one line). Thanks again!
Tom
Chandoo,
Thank you for the posts you are very diligent not to mention very helpful. I would like to know how to get the separation lines on the axis? For example your candy sales chart has longer lines separating east and west how do you format that?
Thanks for being very awesome!
-Josh
Hi Chandoo, we can look the formulas because there is a message:"Unsupported features".
Could you send a diferent Link ?
Thanks.
@SS But what if you've got formulas in the data block (i.e where you would enter static data for the month of december)? My chart now shows #N/A #N/A in the axis with no data for all future dates.
Chandoo, I've got a dynamic range set up showing #N/A errors for future dates. The MMM-DD date format format in row works fine, but when I use YYYY and MMM in two rows, the axis shows #N/A #N/A for all future dates with no data. How would you go about keeping those future months hidden?
Matt -
In order for the axis to automatically extend to the dates within the range and ignore #N/A at the end, you need a date-scale axis, and for this you need to use one column with the complete date, not two columns with year and month.
If you want to use two columns, you need to generate Names in the worksheet which define ranges only as long as the number of months. I have a review of dynamic chart approaches in http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/dynamic-chart-review/ and a whole category on my blog at http://peltiertech.com/WordPress/category/dynamic-charts/. Chandoo also has examples of his own on this site.
How do you make a dynamic chart out of this?
I can't get the axis labels range right.
I tried something like this:
=OFFSET(REPORT!$H$10:$I$10;0;0;COUNTA(REPORT!$H$10:$I$100);1)
Any idea?
Ethan -
Your offset formula defines a range 1 row in size, but the technique here requires 2 rows. Your definition should end with
;2)
instead of
;1)
Thanks Jon,
Got it working now
Great! Now, is there any way to do this directly in Powerpoint? I don't like having linked excel files, so I create the graphs right inside Powerpoint, any way to do this there? I tried and was unsuccessful.
Thanks.
Cool tip Chandoo......thanks
[...] extract year and month from dates to avoid a mess in our stock chart. Chandoo has a great post: Show Months & Years in Charts without ClutteringIn cell B2:=YEAR(D2)In cell B3:=IF(YEAR(D3)=YEAR(D2), "", YEAR(D3))Cell C2:=IF(TEXT(D2, [...]
Hi there,
I have got a data ranging for 3 years. I want to show a chart which shows Jan of 2011, 2012 and 2013 together side by side; then Feb11, Feb12 and Feb13 side by side, then Mar11, Mar12 and Mar13, and so on until December.
Please help. Thanks.
@Bilal
Do you want a number of charts next to each other as separate charts or the data next to each other in a single chart?
What type of chart were you thinking about?
Can you post your data for us to review?
Refer upload instructions at: http://chandoo.org/forum/threads/posting-a-sample-workbook.451/
Hi there
Very good solution this. I have another question on it, though. How do you format the X-axis with monthly gaps (ie, with labels "Jan 2012", "Apr", "Jul", "Oct", "Jan 2013", "Mar", etc), when you're dealing with a data series with weekly or daily data points? The Axis Options dialogue box doesn't appear to offer "Date axis" as an option under the "Axis Type" section.
I've managed to do it in one case with weekly data by setting the interval between tick marks at 13 -- the approximate number of weeks in a quarter -- to get 3-month intervals. But this wouldn't work if I wanted to show 1-month intervals, or had a more detailed daily data series to work with.
Any luck getting the dates to work on a scatter graph? I'm only getting numbers. Works fine on line graphs though.
How can we do the vice versa? i.e. on the x-axis showing year on the level 1, and months on level 2.
I wanted to build these kind of axis labels for 5 years, with year on top and months at the bottom, but it should form in such a way that the seperating lines should seperate the entire data set only at December of each year, and no lines in between any month.
@Apoorve
Just re-arrange the columns
You need to put a space in all cells where you don't want a year
See the attached file
http://chandoo.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Chart-for-Apoorve.xlsx
Unfortunately you don't get any control over lines its all or nothing.
Hello - the link seems to be broken:
http://cid-b663e096d6c08c74.office.live.com/view.aspx/Public/date-axis-months-years-trick.xls
Regards.
Like!!
Three times already today I have used this website and saved a ton of work time in researching excel tricks.
Suggestion: Why not have a "like" or "this article was useful to me" button. That way you can see what is most useful by your users and maybe generate more content based on those "likes".
Just saying. Thanks again and you're doing a great job!
Thanks for the tip. However, I couldn't download your file. The link is broken.
Thank You for taking the time to post this tip. I hope that you have a blessed day.
The link does not work properly and I'm not sure how to actually get the graph to display like this, its frustrating me a tonne. I cant work out what to google either to find an answer elsewhere! 🙁
Is this possible with waterfall chart. Data hereunder -
Years Abbrevation Amt
2020 BEG 2,006
REV 1,950
EMP 1,058
DM (3,244)
OOE 1,078
OPMT 182
AB (638)
END 2,392
2021 REV 8,534
EMP 67
DM (2,142)
OOE (3,120)
OPMT 510
AB 1,008
END 7,249