Reshaping your data easily – Case study [Pivot tables FTW]
Late. Jayaram, my uncle is also a teacher. When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of time with him, learning all sorts of things. He taught me chess, maths and so many life lessons. I remember one such lesson very vividly. One day, he asked me to do something. I did it in a very long way. After seeing me struggle for several minutes, he chipped in and showed me how to do it easily. He then said, “when someone asks you where your nose is, you don’t twist arm around your head. You just point to your nose directly.”
The idea is that when you have a direct, simple way to do something, you should use it.
Nose and pivot tables… how are they connected?
We are coming to the point. Read on for full case study and solution.
Figuring out Employee Churn with Power Query [HR Analytics]
Let’s say you are the people manager at ACME Inc. You are looking staff list for the months – January and February 2017. You see that we had 4,000 employees in Jan and 4,200 employees in Feb. So what is the churn?
- Is it just 200?
- Or is it the sum of people who left and who joined?
- What if you want to find out how many people moved to new designations / departments or groups?
You see, churn is tricky to figure out.
So why not invite the pros? ie Power Query.
Lookup most frequent item [Homework]
Here is an interesting problem to keep your brain cells fight boredom on this Friday & weekend.
Let’s say you have some data like above.
And you want to know, for a given customer name (in cell G4),
- What is the most frequent quantity?
- What is the most often purchased item?
How would you write formulas to get these answers?
Use CTRL to make copies of worksheets quickly
The other day, I found myself making copies of a templated report worksheet. After trying the usual route of “right click on source sheet, select move or copy, check create a copy and press OK” a few times, I thought “well that is asinine.” So I figured, may be CTRL+Drag will create a copy. And what do you know, it does.
So that is our quick tip for the day. Whenever you need to make a copy of something, simply hold CTRL key and drag the thing.
It works for charts, drawing shapes, worksheets and even ranges.
Road Trip Planner Template [Excel Downloads]
We recently went on a road trip around parts of New Zealand’s north island. We have been to Taupo, Rotorua, East Cape and Napier. It took us 2 weeks, we drove more than 2,000 km and spent almost NZ $3,000 on the trip. Of course, being a data nerd, I made a plan of the trip in Excel and that helped us budget for this.
After getting back to home, I thought it would be fun to polish the planner workbook and share it with you all so you too can plan a fabulous road trip. So here we go.
Check for two out of three conditions (Homework)
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.
Untrimmable Spaces – Excel Formula
Let’s talk about the untrimmable spaces.
We all know that TRIM() removes extra spaces from the beginning, ending and middle of a text.
So for example, if A1 has ” something and one more ”
TRIM(A1)
will give “something and one more”
We can use CLEAN() function to remove non-printable characters (like the ASCII codes 0 to 31). Of course, SPACE is technically a printable character, so CLEAN() won’t remove spaces.
The untrimmable spaces…?
The other day Sreekanth emailed me a sample of data and asked, “how do I remove the spaces in this list and convert them to numbers?”
Naturally I tried to TRIM().
But the data won’t budge. See above.
Hmm, let’s investigate why.