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Sick leave entitlement vs usage - Excel problem

Excel Challenges

How many people used their entire sick leave entitlement? [Power Query / Excel homework]

Imagine you are the HR analyst at BigLargeCompany. You are asked to find out whether staff at BLC (BigLargeCompany you silly) use up their full sick leave entitlement.

You have two tables – emps & leaves as illustrated below.

Your mission is to find out answers to below questions.

How many employees used exactly 100% of their entitled sick leave?
How many employees did not take any sick leaves?
Listing of all employees who used 100% of their entitlement

Use either Power Query, Excel formulas or any other technique to answer the questions.

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September 21, 2018

Excel Howtos

Lenient lookup [Advanced Formula Trick]

We all know VLOOKUP (or INDEX+MATCH) as an indispensable tool in our Excel toolbox. But what if you want the lookups to be a little gentler, nicer and relaxed?

Let’s say you want to lookup the amount $330.50 against a list of payments. There is no exact match, but if we look 50 cents in either direction, then we can find a match. Here is a demo of what I mean.

Unfortunately, you can’t convince VLOOKUP to act nice.

Hey VLOOKUP, I know you are awesome and all, but can you cut me some slack here?

VLOOKUP is tough, reliable and has a cold heart. Or is it?

In this post, let’s learn how to do lenient lookups.

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September 13, 2018

Power BI

My top 5 tips for designing beautiful Power BI reports

Power BI allows you to create rich, interactive and informative reports. But it is also a massive pain to create beautiful yet functional reports with Power BI. Over the last 12 months of heavy usage, I have picked up a few tricks to speed up my Power BI report design time. In this post, let me share my top Power BI design tips for creating pretty reports.

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September 10, 2018

Master Class

5 tips: Power Query for Accountants (and finance people) – Free Masterclass

Do you work with accounting or finance data? You are going to love, no scratch that, adore Power Query. It can save you precious time, make you look like a hero in-front of clients and keep you sane.

In this masterclass, learn all about Power Query for accountants (and other kinds of finance people) & 5 tips.

Why Power Query?

Power Query is a data processing software. Using Power Query, you can create process driven programs (queries) to collect data, clean or reshape it, calculate things and publish final output as a table. Once you create a query in PQ, when the underlying data changes, you just refresh the query and brand new data will be fetched, cleaned and published for you.

For example, you can use Power Query to combine ledger files from various accounts to one master file with Power Query. No more VBA or manual copy pasting. Just one query and you are done.

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September 3, 2018

Excel Challenges

When is the next Monday? [Homework]

Psst. Hey you, yeah, you there… have time for a quick date? A date with Excel that is.

If so, take up this homework problem and post your answers in comments.

Assuming you have an input date in cell A1,

What is the formula for finding next Monday?
What is the formula for finding first Monday of next month?

Post your answers in comments

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August 31, 2018

Excel Howtos

Performing Maths in Microsoft Word (In an Excel Blog)

Learn to how perform Maths on Tables of Numbers in Microsoft Word.

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August 28, 2018

Power BI

What is Power BI, Power Query and Power Pivot?

In this installment of Power Mondays, let’s go the very basics of it all.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a software to create and publish interactive, web-enabled reports & visualizations for your audience. You can use Power BI on a PC or web to create things. Once you publish a report (or few visuals), your audience can consume them by using any device – PCs, Macs, Web browsers, Apps on cell phone / tablets etc.

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August 27, 2018

Power Query

How to get a random sample of data with Power Query

Today’s Power Monday trick is about Power Query. This is based on my experience of working with large volumes of data.

Today I have been building a hotel dashboard (more on this later). As part of the dashboard, I wanted to show a random sample of user reviews. Reviews database had quite a few rows, so I wanted to extract a randomized sample of 100 reviews and show them in the report. When you refresh the report (Data > Refresh), then a new set of reviews will be fetched and shown.

Let’s learn how to generate a random sample with Power Query in this article.

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August 20, 2018