Extracting numbers from text in excel [Case study]

Often we deal with data where numbers are buried inside text and we need to extract them. Today morning I had such task. As you know, we recently ran a survey asking how much salary you make. We had 1800 responses to it so far. I took the data to Excel to analyze it. And surprise! the numbers are a mess. Here is a sample of the data.

Quickly Fill Blank Cells in a Table [Reader Tip]

This post is authored by Martin, one of our readers.

Situation:

Sometimes I encounter data in my tables with blank cells where there is a repeated value from the cell directly above. See below:

This can be annoying when it comes to interpreting the data and when sorting columns.

Solution:

To know how I solve this, just read rest of the article.

How to Convert Text to Dates [Data Cleanup]

Sometimes when we import data from another source in to excel, the dates are not imported properly. This can be due to any number of reasons. In this post, we will learn some tricks and ideas you can use to quickly convert text to dates.

How do you consolidate data from multiple sheets in to one? [open thread]

Long time PHD reader and mother of a lovely kid, Michelle, sent me a question in email that provoked me to write this post, I was wondering how to tabulate large amount of information gathered through surveys. Where I work customers are constantly handed survey sheets in order for us to measure how the service […]

Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick

Sometimes we get values in our Excel sheets in such a way that the % sign is omitted. So instead of the value being 23%, it is 23. Now, you can very easily correct this by editing the cell and adding a % sign at the end. But what if you have 100s of rows of data. You can’t do this to every cell. (You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then). There must be some simple and intuitive solution for this … umm.

Flu Trends Chart in Excel [Yes, we can edition]

Last week I have reviewed Google’s flu trends chart and told you that is it is very well made. Out of curiosity I made a similar chart in Excel. In this post, I am going to share the experience and results with you. Interested? Read on…