Here is an interesting twist on the good old VLOOKUP. How to find the pricing applicable for given quantity of a product?
Something like this:
Writing pricing tier lookup formula:
Meet the data:
Let’s say you have data like this:
Assume the data is in a table named pricing
PLOOKUP formula:
Okay, I am kidding. There is no PLOOKUP formula (P for Price). But we can whip our own version of PLOOKUP using other powerful formulas in Excel.
Let’s say we have product name in cell C6 and quantity in cell D6.
To find the applicable unit price of D6 units of C6 (for example 12 units of Mountain Bikes),
We can use below formula:
=SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price], pricing[Product],C6, pricing[Min. Qty],"<="&D6, pricing[Max. Qty], ">="&D6)
Remember: product prices are in the table named pricing.
How does this formula work?
This is a simple SUMIFS formula that looks at the unit price column of pricing table and sums up all unit prices that match with given product name (C6), with quantity (D6) between [Min. Qty] and [Max. Qty] columns.
In other words, this SUMIFS will narrow down to the one row containing Mountain Bike (11-25) tier and returns the price as $300, if our input is 12 units of Mountain Bike.
Oh wait..! What if the quantity is 32?
You are right, our SUMIFS is too lame to handle cases where the input quantity doesn’t fit in any of the tiers.
But, we can use a simple logic to fix this problem.
Here is the final formula that works in all situations:
=MAX( SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price], pricing[Product],C6, pricing[Min. Qty],"<="&D6, pricing[Max. Qty], ">="&D6),SUMIFS(pricing[Unit price],pricing[Product],C6,pricing[Min. Qty],""))
As you can see, we try to find the MAXIMUM of our original SUMIFS and a second SUMIFS that just looks at given product (C6) and blank value for [Min.Qty] column.
Of course, this assumes that prices go down with each tier. If your case is different, you need to alter the formula.
Download pricing tier lookup workbook:
Click here to download the example workbook. Examine the formulas and play with input data to learn how this works. There are two bonus goodies in the workbook.
- The conditional formatting on order form is slick.
- There is an alternative solution with INDEX+MATCH formulas in the data worksheet.
More variations of lookup problems:
Here are few more ways to lookup tricky data:
- Similar problem: Range lookup – find which range contains lookup value
- Case sensitive lookups
- VLOOKUP the last value
- Multi-condition lookup
- Lookup first non-blank value
- More ways to lookup your data
How would you write PLOOKUP?
While the SUMIFS approach works well, it does feel a bit long. Can you think of other ways to write pricing tier lookup formula? Post your answers in the comments section. Teach us something new.
13 Responses to “Convert fractional Excel time to hours & minutes [Quick tip]”
Hi Purna..
Again a great tip.. Its a great way to convert Fractional Time..
By the way.. Excel has two great and rarely used formula..
=DOLLARFR(7.8,60) and =DOLLARDE(7.48,60)
basically US Account person uses those to convert some currency denomination.. and we can use it to convert Year(i.e 3.11 Year = 3 year 11 month) and Week(6.5 week = 6 week 5 days), in the same manner...
This doesn't work for me. When applying the custom format of [h]:mm to 7.8 I get 187:12
Any ideas why?
@Jason
7.8 in Excel talk means 7.8 days
=7.8*24
=187.2 Hrs
=187 Hrs 12 Mins
If you follow Chandoo's instructions you will see that he divides the 7.8 by 24 to get it to a fraction of a day
Simple, assuming the fractional time is in cell A1,
Use below steps to convert it to hours & minutes:
1. In the target cell, write =A1/24
2. Select the target cell and press CTRL+1 to format it (you can also right click and select format cells)
3. Select Custom from “Number” tab and enter the code [h]:mm
4. Done!
Hi, sorry to point this out but Column C Header is misspelt 'Hours Palyed'
good one
So how do I go the other way and get hours and minutes to fractional time?
If you have 7.5 in cell A1,
- Use int(A1) to get the hours.
- Use mod(A1,1)*60 to get minutes.
If you have 7:30 (formatted as time) in A1
- Use hours(a1) to get hours
- Use minutes(a1) to get minutes.
I had the same issue. You can solve it by changing the format as described above:
Right click cell > Format Cells > (In Number tab) > Custom > Then enter the code [h]:mm
([hh]:mm and [hhh]:mm are nice too if you want to show leading zeros)
Thanks guys, these are the tips I'm looking for.
...dividing the number of minutes elapsed by the percent change is my task - "int" is the key this time
It doesnt work for greater than 24 hours
It returns 1:30 for 25.5 hours. It should have returned 25:30
Ideally I would right function as
=QUOTIENT(A1,1)&":"&MOD(A1,1)*60
Sorry, replied to wrong comment....
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I had the same issue. You can solve it by changing the format as described above:
Right click cell > Format Cells > (In Number tab) > Custom > Then enter the code [h]:mm
([hh]:mm and [hhh]:mm are nice too if you want to show leading zeros)
Clever use of MOD here to extract the decimal part of a number. Divide a number containing a decimal by 1 and return the remainder. Humm. Very clever.
Thanks very much, extremely useful !