All articles with 'max()' Tag

VLOOKUP is one of the most useful Excel functions. So much so that I even wrote a book about it. But it has one serious limitation.

It looks up the first occurrence and returns corresponding data.

What if you want to find the last value?

Say, for example, you are looking at a task assignment list and want to know what is the last task assigned to employee Emp13?

We want to extract the task “Make amazing workbook”. Of course our good old VLOOKUP stops once it finds Emp13 and returns the answer as “Create intuitive workbook”.

Who is the most consistent of all?

Imagine you are a category manager at a large e-commerce company. Your site offers various products, but you don’t really make these products. You list products made by other vendors on your site. Every day, these vendors would send you invoices for the amount of product they have sold. Above is a snapshot of such invoices.

Looking at this list, you have a few questions.

1. Who is the best seller?
2. Who is the most active seller?
3. Who is the most consistent seller?
4. Which seller has fewest invoices?

Let’s go ahead and answer these using Excel. Shall we?

We all know about the MAX formula. But do you know about 3D Max?

Sounds intriguing? Read on.

Lets say you are the sales analyst at ACME Inc. Your job involves drinking copious amounts of coffee, creating awesome reports & helping ACME Inc. beat competition.

For one of the reports, you need to find out the maximum transactions by any customer across months.

But there is a twist in the story.

Your data is not in one sheet. It is in multiple sheets, one per month.

Last Friday, we had a fun little Excel challenge – Calculate Maximum Change. More than 170 people commented and shared their solutions to this problem.

And the best part?

The best part is the variety of solutions & thinking displayed by our community. So if you are one of those 170, puff your chest & pat yourself on the back. Go ahead, I will wait.

Today, lets take a look at some of these awesome formulas and understand how they work. Read on and watch the video you below to gain few awesomeness pounds.

Today, lets see how good your formula skills are.

Calculate maximum change

Can you calculate what is the maximum change in product sales between 2 months for above data?

When analyzing business data like sales, shop visits or productivity, one of the questions managers always ask is,

What is the best month / week for this data?

To answer this question, we need to make a chart that looks like above. Today, lets learn how to highlight portions of such charts that correspond to best week or best month.

Did you know What Happened at Last Coffee Day?
Mr. Bean “dressed up” the financial statements and was caught in the fraud. But he was the CEO of Latte! So why did he commit fraud in his own company??

Any Guess?

Take a cappuccino and I will give you a hint – How was Mr. Bean’s Bonus to be decided?

Read on to know more…

We know that using VLOOKUP, we can find a value corresponding to a given item. For example Sales of x. But what if you have multiple sales for each item and you want the last value?

Today lets understand how to find the last date of an activity, given data like above.

Like everything else in Excel, there are multiple ways to finding last date. If cats can use computers, they would hate Excel. You see, Excel is overflowing with unlimited ways to skin a cat.

Here is a quick tip that I learned while conducting training classes in Australia. If you have several dates in a range and you want to find out what the latest date is, just use MAX, like: =MAX(A1:A10) would give you the latest date. A Question…, Assuming you have some dates (not necessarily sorted) in […]

Bhavik’s has presented us with a neat formula to determine how many working days are in a month.
This functionality has a wide range of uses in accounting, payroll, staff scheduling, accommodation planning & reporting and general scheduling activities.

Today in Formula Forensics we pull Bhavik’s Formula apart and see what is going on inside and the offer some extensions to increase the functionality of his 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.

Today in Formula Forensics we look at how to Calculate the Maximum value from a list subject to other fields meeting certain criteria:

Chandoo is off on Holidays and once again thrown me the keys to Chandoo.org.

So this week we’re going to:

• Pull apart an Array Formula and see what’s under the hood;
• Have a look at a technique for quickly developing Custom Number Formats &
• Look at how we can use HTML Codes in posts at Chandoo.org to spice up your questions and answers.

Today is Tarun’s Problem

“I have got multiple names in each row and would like to have what name is repeated maximum number of times and how many times?”

Today we pull apart an answer to this question and see how it works.

It is not too sunny here, but I am going to put on my business man hat. At the end of each month, I ask myself if my business (chandoo.org that is) has performed better or worse. One simple way is to look at previous month’s numbers and then I know how good the latest […]

In many industries, bulk commodities are received or delivered in batches or parcels of various quantities and with various properties.
This post will look at one option for scheduling these commodities within Excel.