An odd lookup problem [Formulas]
Let’s say you have some employee data in employee name, manager name format. But the data is all in one column, with odd rows containing employee names & even rows containing manager names. Something like above.
And you want to find out who is the boss for a given employee. Say, “Andrea Nichols”.
Your regular MATCH() formula for Andrea over the data range returns wrong answer as it will find first occurrence of Andrea (which in this case happens to be on even row, hence a manager record).
So how would you write the lookup formula?
Can you solve this blood pressure problem? [IF Formula Homework]
Over on Facebook, Kristin asks, Help, my blood pressure is going thru the roof. I can’t seem to solve this blood pressure problem.
Let’s simplify Kristin’s problem.
You have some data in the format shown above.
And you want to find out the BP category for each reading, using some rules. Read on to solve the problem.
How to add a line to column chart? [Charting trick]
Let’s say you work in super hero factory as floor manager. You are looking at the recent time sheet data submitted by your underlings and want to know who works more. So you did what any self respecting floor manager does. You made yourself a large cup of hot chocolate, whipped open Excel and created a column chart.
But now, you want to add a line to it at 6:00 PM (or some other arbitrary point) so you can clearly see which superheros are over working.
So how do you go about it?
CP056: So which formulas you should care to learn?
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In the 56th episode of Chandoo.org podcast, let me answer the chicken and egg question of Excel users. How many formulas should you care to learn?
What is in this session?
In this podcast,
- Two personal updates
- 3 legs of formula writing
- Function knowledge
- Operators
- Referencing
- 6 categories of must-know functions
- Basic math
- Conditions
- Lookups
- Text
- Date & time
- Work specific
- Closing remarks & resources for you
Find first & last date of a sale using Pivot tables [quick tip]
Here is a quick Pivot table tip. Let’s say your work at ACME inc. requires some fancy pants analysis of product sales. Imagine looking at below data & trying to find out the earliest & latest date for each product sale.
Of course, we can concoct a version of MINIFS & MAXIFS to answer the question. But why bother, when you can answer the question with just a few clicks.
How many formulas should you learn? [Weekend Poll]
Over at twitter, @for_the_moves asks,
@For_the_moves Same as growing your vocabulary. Remember, words (or functions) = ideas. the more you know, the better you can think.
— Chandoo.org (@r1c1) October 12, 2016
That got me thinking. How many functions should you care to learn?
Finding if a cell has 7 in it… [Pattern matching in Excel]
Imagine you work at MI5 as a HR officer. You want to find all agents who have license to kill (licence 7). Your data looks like above.
How would you go about it?
If you filter the list or use FIND() or SEARCH() formulas, you will end up with agents who also have licenses 77, 17 or not7. So how would you solve this problem?
Of course, you do what any smart person does. You summon Excel and ask it nicely by using some wicked pattern matching logic.