All articles with 'array formulas' Tag

We have a new series on chandoo.org. – Excel Challenges. From now, every 1-2 months, I will post an interesting Excel Challenge. These are tricky problems for which elegant solutions should be found. To keep the challenges exciting, we will have a small prize for a winner (if more people answer correctly, we pick one randomly)

Excel Challenge #1 – Find Overlaps in Machine Schedule Dates

We have an Excel Table, with the following data (snapshot above). You need to write formulas to display Ok or Not Ok in the adjacent column based on the following criteria:

1. Display Ok if the scheduling dates for that row do not overlap with remaining scheduling dates for that machine
2. Display Not Ok otherwise.

Today, we will learn an interesting array formula trick to test if a list is sorted or not. During last one week, I got 2 requests from different clients for some excel related work. Both of them had one thing in common. To test whether a list is sorted or not. So I got thinking, […]

Here is a 2011 new year gift to all our readers – a free 2011 calendar template.

(a little secret: just change the year in worksheet “Full” from 2011 to 2012 to get the next year’s calendar. It works all the way up to year 9999)

You can add notes to individual dates or complete month using the excel template very easily. There are 6 different calendar templates in the download file,

* 4 Yearly Calendar Templates with different color schemes.
* 1 Mini Calendar
* 1 Monthly Calendar (prints in 12 pages)

Go ahead and download the calendar files. Enjoy.

Situation

We know that VLOOKUP formula is useful to fetch the first matching item from a list. So what would you do if you need 2nd (or 3rd etc.) matching item from a list?

For eg. If you have below data, and you want to find out how much sales John made 2nd time, then VLOOKUP formula becomes quite useless. Or is it?!?

Read more to find how to solve this.

Situation

So far we have seen what VLOOKUP formula is and how to put it to some nifty uses. Today, we will go one step further and learn how to do 2 Way Lookups.

What is a 2 Way Lookup?

Lookup is when you find a value in one column and get the corresponding element from other columns. 2 Way Lookup is when you lookup value at the interesection corresponding to a given row & column values.

For example, assuming you have data like below, and you want to findout how much sales Joseph made in month of March, you are essentially doing a 2 way lookup.

Read more to find how to solve this.

SituationVLOOKUP is great for extracting information from a huge data table based on what you are looking for. But what if you need to extract more than one column of information? For eg. Lets say you have salesperson’s name in left most column, and monthly sales figures in next columns, one for each month. Now, you want to find the total sales made by a given sales person. How do you go about it? Read more to find how to solve this.

SituationNot always we want to lookup values based on one search parameter. For eg. Imagine you have data like below and you want to find how much sales Joseph made in January 2007 in North region for product “Fast car”? Read more to find how to solve this.

Excel Array Formulas have subtle beauty and raw power. Today I want to share how you can use Excel Array Formulas to find-out the 2nd largest sale amount corresponding to a particular product.

Lets say you have sales data like this:
Now, we all know that, to get 2nd largest sale amount, we can use the LARGE() formula. Like this: =LARGE(RANGE,2)

But, how do we know what is the 2nd largest sale amount for the product “bricks”?

The other day, while doing consulting for one of my customers, I had a strange problem. My customer has data for several KPIs and she wants to display average of top 5 values in the dashboard. Now, if she wants average of all values, we can use AVERAGE() formula if she wants top 5 values […]

This is second part of 2 part series on conditionally formatting dates in excel.

Highlighting Repeat Customers using Conditional FormattingIn yesterday’s post we have learned how to conditionally format dates using excel. In this article, you will learn how to use these conditional formatting tricks to highlight repeat customers in a list of sales records.

Steven, one of our readers from England sent me a Christmas gift tracker worksheet. I found it pretty cool, so made some minor changes to it and sharing it with you all so that you can have great time shopping for the holidays.

The workbook is full of lessons on conditional formatting, cell formatting, using formulas. Go ahead and download it today.

Anyone working on the data using excel will know the importance of lookup formulas. They are vital for making almost any spreadsheet or dashboard. That is why when my friend John Franco, who maintains Excel-Spreadsheet-Authors.com, wrote to me about his new book Excel lookup toolbox I was truly excited. In this post I am going to share my review of this product.

It is no exaggeration that knowing excel formulas can give you a career boost. From someone starting at the long list of numbers, you can suddenly become a data god who can lookup, manipulate and analyze any spreadsheet.

So when our little excel blog hit the 5000 RSS Subscriber milestone, I celebrated the occasion by asking you to share an excel formula through twitter or comments with rest of us. And boy, what an excellent list of formula tips you have shared with us all.
Here is the complete list of entries for the twitter formula contest.

Time for blowing my own trumpet and patting my own back over my pointy hair. I feel very proud to announce that our little community at Pointy Haired Dilbert now has its five thousandth member.

Take a minute and pat yourself on the back. This is an achievement because of you. Go ahead, I am waiting.

Ok, enough patting. Time for some gifts and fun.

We have 2 contests to celebrate the occasion. This is the first one. I will announce the second contest tomorrow. Read the rest of this post to find out more about the twitter formula contest

Here is a little formula trick if you need to sum a range of cells based on multiple conditions.

Assuming you have the starfleet, captain and flight data, you can use the good old sum() in an array formula to conditionally sum values meeting multiple criteria. Read on to learn this quick tip.