An odd lookup problem [Formulas]
Let’s say you have some employee data in employee name, manager name format. But the data is all in one column, with odd rows containing employee names & even rows containing manager names. Something like above.
And you want to find out who is the boss for a given employee. Say, “Andrea Nichols”.
Your regular MATCH() formula for Andrea over the data range returns wrong answer as it will find first occurrence of Andrea (which in this case happens to be on even row, hence a manager record).
So how would you write the lookup formula?
Finding the closest school [formula vs. pivot table approach]
First a quick personal update: There has been a magnitude 7.8 earth quake in NZ on 14th November 2016 early morning. It is centered in Kaikoura, which is about 250 km away from Wellington. We did feel several shakes and after shocks. It has been an interesting and often scary experience. But my family is safe. I feel very sad for the all the damage and the loss for families in NZ. If you suffered from this quake, My prayers and thoughts are with you.
Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question. He has school distance data, like above. He wants to know which is the closest school for each school.
There are a few ways to answer this question. Let’s examine two approaches – formulas & pivot tables and see the merits of both.
Finding if a cell has 7 in it… [Pattern matching in Excel]
Imagine you work at MI5 as a HR officer. You want to find all agents who have license to kill (licence 7). Your data looks like above.
How would you go about it?
If you filter the list or use FIND() or SEARCH() formulas, you will end up with agents who also have licenses 77, 17 or not7. So how would you solve this problem?
Of course, you do what any smart person does. You summon Excel and ask it nicely by using some wicked pattern matching logic.
Analyzing 300,000 calls for help [case study]
Over the weekend, I got an email from Mr. E, one of my students. Mr. E works at a police department in California and as part of his work, he was looking at calls received by police. Whenever police get a call for help, multiple teams can respond to the call and go to the location. All of these dispatches are recorded. So a single call can have several such dispatches. And Mr. E wanted to findout which team responded the first. The problem?
Finding the first responded team is tricky.
Today let’s take up this problem as a case study and understand various methods to solve it. We are going to learn about writing better lookups, pivot tables, power pivot and optimization. Put on your helmets, cause this is going to be mind blowingly awesome.
What is the sum of values excluding items on stop list? [home work]
Okay, this is an extension of the Neither “A” Nor “B” sum problem we discussed few days back.
Imagine you have a table named mydata with a few columns and a stop list named stop.list as shown above.
How would you calculate,
- Sum of Hours for all activities excluding those in stop list?
- Sum of all Regular hours for activities not in stop list?
So go ahead and post your answers in the comments.
How many ‘Friday the 13th’s are in this year? [Formula fun + challenge]
Today is Friday the 13th. If you are a raging friggatriskaidekaphobiac, I suggest you to stop reading this post. For the rest of you, I have something fun.
Given a year in cell C3, let’s find out all the months with Friday the 13th. Something like above.
Extract the 10 digit number [formula homework]
Okay, time for another challenge.
Imagine you have some data like this. Each cell contains 3 numbers separated by line break – CHAR(10) and you need to extract the number that is 10 digits long.
Go ahead and solve this riddle.