All articles with 'Learn Excel' Tag

Mary Ellen, one of our readers, has an interesting conundrum,

I have some data that goes to Pivot table then to pivot chart. There is a slicer to filter the data. But when I slice, my pivot chart gets messed up. How to have the slicer, but still see the insights in the chart?!?

See above demo to understand:

This is because when you slice by a school, the pivot table gets filtered and hence % row total for that school becomes 100% (as there are no other schools).

How to fix the problem? The easy answer is to remove the slicers. But we want to have our slicers and eat a slice of them too. So we crank up the Excel awesomeness valve and get to work. There are two ways to achieve what we want.

• Old school method: Two pivot tables, some formulas & a line chart
• New Excel method: Power Pivot and a line chart

Read the rest of this article to know more.

One of our readers emailed this question recently,

I like the conditional formatting icons. I am trying to present some business data where going down is good. How do I get a green colored down arrow icon?

Essentially, Ms. CanIGetItInGreen wants this:

Unfortunately, Excel’s conditional formatting icons are not customizable. So we can’t get the green down arrows without some sneak. And sneak we shall.

Or more appropriately titled, the one where Power Query solves the problem in less time than it takes you to say Get & Transform Data.

Recently, one of my students Mr. K, sent me a pivot table problem.

Today my boss asked me “how much we paid to staff since the inception of our business with their respective date of joining?” He wanted to know, level wise summary of the last 16 years (on Quarterly / Year wise basis).

The records appended from the database month wise. Have a look to the file and give your ideas.

Mr. K’s data looked like above.

Let’s say you have data in a worksheet in various ranges, and you want sum up each range at the bottom.

Something like this:

How to do all this one shot?

Simple. We use multi-select & ALT=

This is the final part of our series on how to analyze half a million customer complaints. Click below links to read part 1 & 2.

1. Complaint reason analysis – Part 1
2. Regional trends & analysis – Part 2

Customer satisfaction scorecard

In the previous parts of this case study, we understood what kind of complaints were made and where they came from (states). For the customer satisfaction scorecard, let’s focus on individual companies.

In case, this is the first time you are hearing about Excel formula wildcards, check out the Using wildcards in Excel VLOOKUP formula tutorial.

So you know about wild cards like * ?, now how would you tell VLOOKUP to ignore them?

Say, you are genuinely interested in looking the value “* Payroll” in a lookup table. What then?

This is exactly the problem faced by Peter in our forum post VLOOKUP and cells with “*” NOT to be interpreted as wildcard

Most advanced Excel users know that slicers are cool. Today, let’s learn how to use slicers to create an awesome selection mechanism for your dashboards and forms.

First see a quick demo

Looks slick, eh? Read on.

It seems spreadsheets & dinosaurs on a collision course. How else can you explain Jon’s XKCD Velociraptor problem solved with Excel and now this. Debby, alert reader of our blog sent me this email yesterday.

I need an algebraic formula to solve this in Excel

I have 5 heads, 5 bodies, 4 arm sets, 4 leg sets and 3 tails. I need to see if I can create 1000 dinosaurs from these, and if that’s too many AND I need the 5 digit groupings to prove it and create them.
basically Xa*Xb*Xc*Xd*Xe=1000 – I’m not supposed to go over 1200. […] And then I want the 5 digit combinations if possible – right now they are trying to do the combinations by hand – would be awesome if we could do it in Excel.

Here is a quick tip to reduce the time you spend on chart formatting – use chart styles & color themes.

Excel offers various pre-defined color schemes and chart styles. Using them is very simple.

1. Select your chart
2. Go to Chart Design ribbon
3. Click on the style or color scheme you want.
4. Your chart changes instantly.

A very happy new year to you. May 2016 be your most awesome year yet.

This year too I plan to share tutorials, tips, podcasts & videos to make you awesome. I hope to focus on

• Excel 2016 – exploring new features
• Power BI – What is it, how does it make you awesome.
• Write a sequel to The VLOOKUP Book.
• Launch a new online course on Power BI & New Excel.
• Run 2 more batches of 50 ways to analyze data program in Feb & July 2016.
• Run another dashboard contest on Chandoo.org
• Write about awesome ways to work with data – formulas, charts, tables, pivots etc.
• Talk about many advanced and work specific Excel scenarios in the podcast

But wait, what do you want to learn more…?

While these are my plans, I want to make sure Chandoo.org helps you the best. So please take a minute and answer this one question survey.

Here is a New year gift to all our readers – free 2016 Excel Calendar & daily planner Template.

This calendar has,

• One page full calendar with notes, in 4 different color schemes
• Daily event planner & tracker
• 1 Mini calendar
• Monthly calendar (prints to 12 pages)
• Works for any year, just change year in Full tab.

2015 has been the busiest year since starting Chandoo.org.

Wow, that is 12 years of breaking previous records. Thank you.

In 2015, we published 124 posts (down 3% YoY), received 6,300+ comments (up 5%). Our forum too had busy year with 1000s of new members and 5,000+ new threads. Chandoo.org podcast continued to shine, we had 24 episodes this year and reached the 50 episode milestone. Our podcast episodes has been downloaded more than 900,000 so far since launch (in March 2014) with 600,000+ downloads this year alone!!!

Fun fact: People have spent 6.8 million minutes in 2015 listening to Chandoo.org podcast. (assuming only 50% of downloads materialized to listens)

We have trained more than 1,800 people thru my online classes – Excel School, VBA Classes & 50 ways to analyze data program.

2015 has been the most awesome year since starting Chandoo.org Thank you so much for making it happen. This year, more than 11 million people visited our site (up 8%), learned something and took first step to become awesome in their work. 2015 has been an amazing journey, thanks to all your visits, listens, purchases, […]

Here is a quick but challenging homework problem for you.

Let’s say you have two dates – Start and End.

And you want to find out how many Mondays are there between those two dates (including the start & end dates).

What formula would give the answer?

Please post your formulas / VBA functions / DAX measures in the comments section.

Let’s learn how to create a color changing line chart using Excel. This is what we will create.

Looks interesting? Read on.