All articles with 'excel tables' Tag

Excel formulas acting slow? Today lets talk about optimizing & speeding up Excel formulas. Use these tips & ideas to super-charge your sluggish workbook. Use the best practices & formula guidelines described in this post to optimize your complex worksheet models & make them faster.

1. Use tables to hold the data
2. Use named ranges & named formulas
3. Use Dynamic Array formulas
4. Sort your data
5. Use manual calculation mode

… and more. Read on to learn these top 10 tips & ideas to improve performance of your excel formulas.

Of all the charting features in Excel, Sparklines are my absolute favorite. These bite-sized graphs can fit in a cell and show powerful insights. Edward Tufte coined the term sparkline and defined it as,

intense, simple, word-sized graphics

Sparklines (often called as micro-charts) add rich visualization capability to tabular data without taking too much space. This page provides a complete tutorial on Excel sparklines.

We can take any Excel workbook and format it until Christmas, and we would still not be done. But not many of us have so much of time or energy. So, today, lets talk formatting.

In this, you will learn how to
1) Use tables to format data quickly
2) Change colors of your worksheet in a snap
3) Use cell styles
4) Quickly clone formatting using format painter
5) Clear formats to begin with a clean-slate
6) Formatting shortcuts
7) Formatting options for print
and 8 ) Why you should not go overboard formatting and 10 other tips.

So go ahead and become a formatting pro.

Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.

What is an excel table?

Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”

On twitter I follow many charting and visualization related accounts. One of them is @Andy Kriebel, who runs Makeover Monday. The idea is simple. Every Monday they publish a data-set and ask the community to visualize. Last Monday (7th May, 2018), they have published about toughest sport by skill data. This categorizes 60 sports by 10 skill categories to find out which sport is the toughest. Over the weekend, Andy posted a summary of all toughest sport viz entries. Many of the entries are made in Tableau. I thought it would be a fun challenge to re-create some of these charts in Excel. The result is this post. 60 sports in 6 charts. Check out the charts and download workbook to learn more.

First four charts are re-creations of Tableau designs. Last two are mine.

Let’s start the new year with a bang.

Excel Tables were introduced more than a decade ago, but a lot of people don’t know them or under utilize them. So start this year by becoming a very table genius.

What is Excel Table?

Excel tables are a simple and elegant way to structure and store your data. Let’s say you have staff details like below. Instead of calling it like A1:E72, you can convert this data in to a table and call it, you guessed it right, covfefe (or more coherent option like – staff).

Imagine you are the first officer at ship terminal αε974F1 on remote planet Alderaan. Your job involves looking at terminal log to see anomalies in time space continuum. So one day after getting to work late, thanks to crazy traffic on the floating super way in your settlement, you are looking at latest terminal log for αε974F1 on Excel (of course Excel, what else are you going to use? Notepad?!?) and want to check all the records logged at 7 AM on any day. You don’t have all the time in universe to filter records one at a time. You don’t want to write a formula or something else as it is too early in the morning and the nearest Starbucks is 7 light years away. So what would you do?

Use filters of course.

Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig. 

If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.

Excel Tables have been around for a decade now (they are introduced in Excel 2007), and yet, very few people use them. They are versatile, easy and elegant. At Chandoo.org, we celebrate Tables all the time. If you have never used them, start with below tuts.

• Introduction to Excel tables
• How to use structured referencing
• Tables and Relationships in Excel
• Using lookups and other formulas with Excel tables
• Simple way to get absolute references in Tables
• Customizing table styles for awesome usability

While tables are super helpful, they do come with some limitations. Today let’s examine one such unique problem and learn about an elegant solution.

Imagine you are the head of training department at ACME Inc. You arrange training programs round the year to empower your team. It is hard work, coordinating between employees, trainers, department heads, venues and coffee machines. What if there is something to help you keep track of all this? I am not talking about getting you a shiny new iPad, you silly. I am talking about a tracker & calendar built in Excel that ties everything together (well, almost everything, you still have to fill the coffee machine.)

We are going to build a training program tracker & calendar using Excel.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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In the 47th session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s see how Excel can make you an awesome entrepreneur.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Why Excel for entrepreneurs
• Key areas of a business owner’s work
  • Projects & to dos
  • Finances
  • Customers & marketing
  • Planning & strategy
  • Processes & workflows
• 5 features of Excel that help
• Conclusions

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS

In the 43rd session of Chandoo.org podcast, let’s talk about top time saving features of Excel.

What is in this session?

In this podcast,

• Quick announcement about Awesome August
• My 9 favorite time saving features of Excel
• Remove Duplicates
• Tables
• Pivot Tables
• Auto fill
• Format Painter
• Find & Replace
• VBA / Macro Recorder
• Auto save
• Auto complete / Intellisence
• Recap & Conclusions

Power Query offers many ways to get data to Excel. One of them is to Web Data import feature. Let’s understand how this works by importing world stock exchange closing data from Google Finance website.

[Related: Introduction to Power Query]

We all know that area charts are great for understanding how a list of values have changed over time. Today, let’s learn how to create an area chart that shows different colors for upward & downward movements.

The inspiration for this came from a recent chart published in Wall Street Journal about Chinese stock markets.

We will try to create a similar chart using Excel. We are going to create the above chart in Excel.

Looks interesting? Read on…

Filtering is one of the most used feature in Excel. It is a quick way to take lots of data and narrow down to the subset we want.

But here is one common filtering scenario that is slow as snail.

Imagine you are looking at some sort of sales data (if you can’t imagine, look at the above demo).

Now, you want to filter this list for gender=male, profession=self-employed, product category = chocolates and  quantity = 1.

If you use the right click, filter > filter by selected value approach, this will take several clicks.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you can select the entire combination and say filter?

Unfortunately, no such feature exists in Excel.

But you are not aiming to be ordinary in Excel.  You are aiming to be awesome in Excel. That means, you don’t take no for answer.

Fortunately, we can quickly write a VBA macro that filters a list by selection. So let’s do that.