I recently went to Sydney to conduct some training programs on Advanced Excel and Power BI. While I was there, I met my good friend Danielle, who runs Plum Solutions, a financial modeling consultancy & training company. We got talking about various things and the topic eventually turned to “finance people and Power BI”. We debated whether finance professionals (analysts, reporting people, financial modelers and controllers) should bother learning Power BI or stick to Excel.
As this is an interesting topic, I am sharing my thoughts in this post along with a video of our debate at the end of it. Feel free to chip in and share your views to.
Let’s examine both sides of the argument. We start with why you need to learn Power BI and then look at why you don’t want to.
Why finance people should learn Power BI?
- Power BI is visual & easy: You can quickly take a P&L or complex model outputs and turn them in to a bunch of interactive visuals with Power BI. We all know how much decision makers and customers love visuals. So this is a huge win.
- Power BI makes it easy to share stuff: We all know about the 70Mb workbooks that calculate NPV of a project or compare few different scenarios. Unfortunately that hunk of a file can’t be emailed CFO as she is globe-trotting and can’t run array formulas on her iPhone. On the other-hand Power BI files can be shared easily. You just publish and send the link or notification to the people. They can check it out on phone / tablet / computer and interact too.
- Consolidate data with Power Query: Ok, this is not just Power BI thing. With Power Query, we can consolidate files, stitch together tables and merge different sets of data. This means, no more manual tasks or laborious lookups.
- Visual scenarios with what-if parameters: You can use what-if parameters, slicers in Power BI to make interactive scenarios. This is so much better than using either scenario manager or changing cell values in Excel.
- Work on larger sets of data easily: Excel has physical limit of 1mn rows per spreadsheet. So if you are forecasting operations of a large company, chances are you have more than a million rows and hit the limit in Excel. Power BI has no such limits, so you can happily work on larger data-sets.
- Power BI is regularly improving: Almost every month Microsoft releases a new version of Power BI. This is good for people who are building things as you have new capabilities to rely on and improve user experiences.
Why finance people don’t need to learn Power BI?
- Power BI is not Excel: This is the big one. You can’t create everything you do in Excel with Power BI. Many things that finance people do in Excel like making statutory statements (balance sheets, P&L etc.) or creating scenarios or running monte-carlo simulations on forecasts are ridiculously hard to reproduce in Power BI. Power BI good for visuals, but all the heavy lifting must be done in Excel.
- Power BI doesn’t yet have many basic finance functions: Simple things like calculating NPV or Future value of a cash flow become a laborious mathematical exercise in Power BI. This is because the calculation engine of Power BI – Power Pivot, yet doesn’t have many finance functions.
- Power BI is very technical: Most finance people would learn how to work on finance & accounts in Excel. So Excel becomes a second language for them. But Power BI is not an extension of Excel. It is a deeply technical and complex software. So to get most of out it, finance people need to pick up technical skills like DAX, M and data modeling.
- Power BI is regularly changing: Let’s admit it. Nobody like change. As Power BI rolls out new version every month, you will be forced to stay on top to feel at home. New features come, screens change, buttons move around and options add every month. Knowing all this and keeping up can be hard.
My take – Learn Power BI anyway
I think Power BI is a valuable skill to acquire nevertheless. The reasons:
- Reuse the skills in Excel: Core components of Power BI – Power Query & Power Pivot can be used in Excel too.
- Learning new things is fun: Just as squats make your legs fit, learning new things keeps your brain fit.
- Power BI can open new doors for you: With each new skill you acquire, you will find new opportunities. It can help you find that exciting job or start a business.
- Power BI is free: Power BI Desktop software is free to download and install. There is heaps of free tutorials, examples and videos online (including on chandoo.org) to help you learn it. Even Excel is not free. So why not give it a try.
- Data skills are hot: Skills like how databases work, how to analyze data and how to tell stories thru visuals are very hot now. Power BI (and Excel too) makes it very easy to practice these skills.
Watch the debate with Danielle
I recorded a video with Danielle where we debated pros & cons of Power BI for finance people. Watch it below or see it on my YouTube channel.
What is your take on this?
Do you work in finance? What are your thoughts about Power BI? Share them below using comments. I want to hear what you think.
Want to learn Power BI? See these tutorials & articles
If the jargon of Power BI world is spinning your head, start with this simple explanation of what is Power BI.
For more examples and tutorials, check out the Power BI category on Chandoo.org or see this epic introduction video.
20 Responses to “Untrimmable Spaces – Excel Formula”
Hi Chandoo,
First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! Wish you and your family another fruitful year ahead.
To answer your question: Power Query is the best way to trim. 🙂
Btw, if Power Query is not available, then formula would absolutely do... but did you forget to mention also Char 32?
One more question: Is the trailing minus meant to be a negative number? Maybe only the sender knows... 🙂
Cheers,
I just see your PQ way, it is amazing, I think it is the most simple way.
No idea how it did it?
I know these spaces can be a real pain but these days I advise Excel users to learn and use Flash Fill and that will learn what to do pretty quickly.
Highlight range to be cleaned. Then, in Replace, hold down the Alt key and type 0160. Replace with nothing.
I accomplished this by writing a macro to go through all the possible unprintable characters. Looped through the range.
@Steve
Brute force works just as well, its just slower
I use a different method here. First, I will copy the data from Excel and paste it in a notepad. In Notepad, I will do a Find Blanks (Space " ") and Replace (Empty) with nothing.
Then you can copy the data from Notepad and paste it back to Excel which will be a perfect number as you desire.
But Thanks for the formula. Its probably the 2nd out of 8 tricks as Chandoo mentioned. Waiting for the rest among 8 from other users 🙂
Hi....
You don't always need notepad for that. I use the Find/Replace is Excel works just fine.
I don't understand the x's. Why weren't they removed in the formula? Or are they part of some sort of numeric formatting that I'm not familiar with? I saw how you handled the non-breaking spaces and the dashes, but am confused about what role the x's played in all this.
Thanks!
Hi Andrew ,
The xs have been used solely to demarcate the actual data text ; thus , without the x in place at the end of text , as in :
x 4,124,500.00 x
it would be impossible to know that there are unwanted trailing characters , in this case , after the last 0.
These xs are not part of the original data text , nor are they used in the formulae ; they are put in only so that readers can visualize the individual items of data as they are in practice. Think of them as imaginary delimiters.
Oh, that makes sense! Thank you for the explanation. I had a feeling it was something along those lines.
You can type this character using the Keys Alt+0160.
Very useful to replace this Character using Find and Select resource.
For many years, my jobs have included ETL tasks and I built this macro to help long, long ago. I tweak it every now and again. Many co-workers, past and present, have it wired to a button on their toolbar.
Sub Clean_and_Trim()
'CAUTION: Strips leading zeroes -- do not use on zipcodes, etc.
If Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
Revert = 1
ElseIf Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual Then
Revert = 0
End If
For Each Cell In Selection
For x = Len(Cell.Value) To 1 Step -1
If Asc(Mid(Cell.Value, x, 1)) = 160 Then
Cell.Replace What:=Chr(160), Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
End If
If Asc(Mid(Cell.Value, x, 1)) = 32 Then
Cell.Replace What:=Chr(32), Replacement:=" ", LookAt:=xlPart, MatchCase:=True
End If
Next x
If Cell.Value "" Then
Cell.Value = Application.Clean(Application.Trim(Cell.Value))
End If
Next
If Revert = 1 Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
ElseIf Revert = 0 Then
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
End If
End Sub
This is awesome! What if you have several characters you need to have removed? What would be the easiest way as I can imagine there are several ways.?
# - 35
$ - 36
- 62
/ - 47
, - 44
. - 46
" - 34
: - 58
This is typical case of a Fitbit data export to Csv file. Each number has CHAR160 as thousand separator.. how smart Fitbit, thank you 😉
By the way, i prefer to copy the character, and use find and replace.
Sometimes it happens if you copy a table from outlook and paste it in excel. When you apply formula on those cells you will get error. What i use to do is
copy one character that looks like space,
select the entire range,
go to Find and replace,
Paste the copied character in Find option
Leave the replace option unfilled..
click on replace all..
All the errors shall be converted in to proper values..
Process looks lengthier.. but it is one of the simplest method
If Clean, Trim, and Substitute, or Find and Replace does not complete the job, I usually enter a value of 1 in an empty cell. Copy the Value of 1, Highlight the range of text numbers, and Paste Special, Values, Multiply. This site is great!
You can use Dose for Excel Add-In that can quickly clean huge data with one click besides more than +100 new functions and features to add to your Excel to save time and effort.
https://www.zbrainsoft.com
Hi,
I have a problem in excel. The sheet attached herewith.
TABLE CONFIG 2/6
A B C D E F G H
1 WEIGHT1 43,599 WEIGH2 62500 WEIGHT3 77000 WEIGHT4 66,500
2 DEDUCTION1 15,000 DEDUCTION1 15,000 TEMP 0 DEDUCTION2 11,005
3 RESULT 58,599 RESULT-1 77,500 RESULT-2 77,000 RESULT-3 77,505
4 RESULT SUBSTRACT 0 0 0
5 REQUIRED VALUE 77,500 77,000 77,505
Note: 1- RESULT (58599) IS TO BE DEDUCTION EITHER FROM D4 OR F4 OR H4 WHICHEVER IS MOST
LEAST CELL AMONG RESULT-1 OR RESULT-2 OR RESULT 3.
2-HENCE, RESULT VALUE $B$3 IS TO BE PRESENTED ON CELL EITHER D4 OR F4 OR H4 WHICHER IS
MOST LEAST VALUE
3-FORMULA =IF(E8<H8,$B$9,IF(E8<J8,$B$9,IF(H8<J8,$B$9,IF(H8<E8,$B$9,IF(J8<H8,$B$9))))))
CREATED ON CELL D4,F4 & H4 DID NOT WORK.
PLS FOR YOUR HELP.
THANK YOU
@R
Why not ask the question in the Chandoo.org Forums
https://chandoo.org/forum/
You can attach a file there