All articles with 'len()' Tag

Use the new Textjoin() function to reverse a string of characters suing a formulaic solution.

Here is an interesting problem to start your day.

Let’s say you work as DNA sequencing engineer at The Enterprise. And you just unlocked the sequence that is responsible for all male problems. The early onset of baldness. The sequence code is AAAA. And you want to find out how many times this sequence is found in a sample of DNA strings, in the range B6:B19. Essentially you want the above.

So how do you write the formula?

True story:

On Friday (17th April – 2015), I flew from Vizag (my town) to Hyderabad so that I can catch a flight to San Francisco to attend a conference. As I had 10 hours of overlay between the flights in Hyderabad, I checked in to a lounge area so that I can watch some sports, eat food while pretending to do work on my laptop. There was a gentleman sitting in adjacent space doing some work in Excel. As I began to compose few emails, the gentleman in next sitting space asked me what I do for living. Our conversation went like this.

Me: I run a software company
He: Oh, so you must be good with computers
Me: smiles and cringes at the stereotyping
He: What is the formula to select all the blank cells in my Excel data and highlight them in Yellow color

Mind you, he had no idea that I work in Excel. We were 2 random guys in airport lounge watching sports and eating miserable food.

Me: Well, what are you trying to do?
He: You see, I am auditing this data. I need to locate all the blank rows and set them in different color so that my staff can fill up missing information. Right now, I am selecting one row at a time and filling the colors. Is there a one step solution to this problem?

Needless to say, I showed him how to do it faster, which led to an interesting 3 hours at the lounge.

End of true story.

So today, let’s understand how to find & highlight all the blank cells in the data.

Welcome back to yet another gripping episode of “When good formulas go GREAT”. We’re working up the singles charts to the number one hit “Formula Challenge 001 – Return everything in string after first block of numbers” By way of a quick refresher, this formula challenge calls for a formula to return a substring from […]

Today we look at the third place winner from our inaugural Formula Challenge, a neat solution provided by Sajan.

This new series introduces a new author to Chandoo.org, Jeff.
Jeff will pose a number of Excel based Formula Challenges and then explain how some of the solutions work in a manner similar to the Formula Forensics series.

In this first post of the series we look at how to extract a string from the right of a block of Numbers in a larger string.

Today lets tackle a very familiar problem. You have a bunch of very long, complicated file names & paths. Your boss wants a list of files extracted from these paths, like below:

Of course nothing is impossible. You just need correct ingredients. I cannot help you with a strong cup of coffee, so go and get it. I will wait…

Back already? well, lets start the formula magic then.

Today in Formula Forensics we look at how to strip away leading zeroes from strings with this simple array formula

Houston, We’ve Had a Problem!
In the initial emails requesting a solution to yesterday’s Formula Forensics, Chandoo’s solution, although Technically correct, Didn’t work ?
This post looks at the problem and what was wrong with the data causing the error.

Palindrome: – A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction, with general allowances for adjustments to punctuation and word dividers (“Wikipedia”).

This week in Formula Forensics we’re having a look at determining if a cell contains a palindrome.

Formula Forensics # 002 – Joyces Question

This is the second post of a new regular weekly series at Chanoo.org, Formula Forensics, where we will examine how a formula works from the inside out with a worked example to help you understand its formation.

Last week we looked at Taruns problem and analysed a formula to solve his problem

This week we look at Joyce’s Problem…

The other day, while I was putting my kids to sleep, this idea came to me. How do I check if a cell contains a palindrome, using Excel formulas?

Next morning, I wrestled with excel for about 20 minutes and boom, the formula is ready.

But what is a palindrome?
A palindrome is a word, phrase, verse, or sentence that reads the same backward or forward. For example: A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
So, to check if a cell contains palindrome, we need to reverse the cell contents and see if both original and reverse are the same.

Here is a fun formula to write.

Given a number in cell, I want you to find the sum of digits in it. So, for eg. if you have the number 3584398594 in a cell, the sum would be =3+5+8+4+3+9+8+5+9+4, equal to 58.

Now, how would you write a formula to find this sum automatically based on the number entered in the cell?

Go ahead and figure it out. If you can, come back and check your answer with mine below.

It is no exaggeration that knowing excel formulas can give you a career boost. From someone starting at the long list of numbers, you can suddenly become a data god who can lookup, manipulate and analyze any spreadsheet.

So when our little excel blog hit the 5000 RSS Subscriber milestone, I celebrated the occasion by asking you to share an excel formula through twitter or comments with rest of us. And boy, what an excellent list of formula tips you have shared with us all.
Here is the complete list of entries for the twitter formula contest.

Jarad asks me in an email “how word frequency can be generated from a range of cells using excel formulas?” This got me thinking and lead to this post, where we learn how to calculate word frequency using array formulas and use it to analyze a bunch of search keywords.