All articles with 'excel formulas' Tag

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 35 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

How about a fun Excel challenge? I have data in below format in the table named trips I want to know which employees visited both USA & UK? How would you solve this problem? Post your solutions in the comments. Need sample data & my solution? Click here to download the file. Want more challenges […]

Excel text functions are essential for cleaning up data, extracting parts or combining results. Learn the most important functions and their usage in this article.

IF is the most used Excel function out there. Here are 10 advanced IF tricks to take your formulas to next-level ?

9 box grid is a popular method for talent mapping. Download this free excel template for tracking and visualizing your employee performance & potential data.

In this article, I explain about powerful excel features like FILTER(), SORT() and CONCATENATEX() to create a similar 9 box talent map grid for your data.

Are you in IT & use Excel often? This article explains top 10 formulas for IT professionals. Useful for project managers, IT analysts, Testing people and BAs.

We cover a 10 practical situations and explore various Excel formulas to solve them. Example workbook provides more details too.

Use TEXTJOIN function to combine text values with optional delimiter. It is better than CONCATENATE because you can pass a range instead of individual cells and you can ignore empty cells too. Here is a sample use of TEXTJOIN Excel function.

Time for another Excel formula / Power Query challenge. This is based on a common business data analysis problem. Say you have two tables – calls log and office hours. Call log tells when each call is received. Office hours tell us working hours for seven days of the week. We want to know how many calls are outside office hours.

Easter is around the corner. After what seemed like weeks of lousy weather, finally the sun shone today. I capitalized on the day by skipping work, walking kids to school, taking Jo out for some shopping, enjoying a leisurely walk / cycling with Nishanth in the park and almost forgetting about the blog. But it is dark now and before tucking the kids in, let me post a short but interesting home work problem.

Let’s say you are HR manager at Egg Co. and you are looking at the vacation plans of your team.

Easter is your busiest time and it would be a bummer if a majority of your staff are on leave during the Easter season (14th of April to 28th of April, 2017). So you want to know how many people are on leave. A snapshot of your data (table name: lvs) is shown above.

Click here to download the sample file.

You want to answer below three questions:

1. How many employees are on leave during Easter holidays (14th of April to 28th of April)?
2. How many employees are on approved vacation during Easter holidays?
3. How many employees in “Team ninja” are on approved leave during Easter holidays? Assume team employee numbers are in named range ninja

Time for some logic check.

Suppose, you have three logic values in A1:C1 (TRUE or FALSE values in each cell)

You need to find out if ONLY two of these values are TRUE.

How would you write the formula?

Got an answer? Awesome. Just post your formula in the comments. Let’s see how much variety we can get from all of our readers.

We, adults can’t escape three things:

1. Deadlines
2. Demanding bosses (replace with customers or nagging spouses or naughty kids)
3. Taxes

While I can’t help you with demanding bosses or taxes, when it comes to deadlines, I have the right tool for you.

A tracker that highlights all overdue items so that you know where to focus your attention.

Let’s learn how to use awesome powers of Excel to find-out which items are due. You can apply these concepts to nail down over due invoices, pending project tasks or scheduling workforce.

On Wednesday (15th July), I ran my first ever webinar, on a topic called, “How to be a BETTER Analyst?” (here is the replay link, in case you missed it).  It was a huge success. More than 1,100 people attend the live webinar and hundreds more watched the replay. As part of the webinar, we had interactive Q&A. Viewers posted their questions and I replied to as many of them as I can.

After the webinar, I wanted to make sure I covered all the questions. So I downloaded the chat history. There were more than 700 messages in it. And I am not in the mood to read line by line to find-out the questions. A good portion of chat messages were not questions but stuff like ‘hello everyone, I am from Idaho’, ‘Wow, Chandoo has beard!”, “Enjoying a beer in Belgium while watching webinar” etc. So I wanted a quick way to flag the messages as question or not.

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 25 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

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In the 37th session of Chandoo.org podcast, Let’s debug ’em #VALUEs & #N/As.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Introduction to Excel formula errors
• The easy kind: syntax errors
• The triky ones: # ERRORs
• Fixing errors – using IFERROR & ISERROR
• Error checking & debug options
• Using Errors deliberately – charts & data validation
• A challenge for you – produce #NULL error
• Conclusions

Here is a simple but tricky problem. Imagine you are the HR manager of a teeny-tiny manufacturing company. As your company is small, you just have one employee in the shop floor. He is Mr. Billy. As this is a one person production facility, Billy has the flexibility to choose his working hours. At the […]