All articles with 'pivot tables' Tag

Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.

So today let me share with you 35 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.

Excel formulas acting slow? Today lets talk about optimizing & speeding up Excel formulas. Use these tips & ideas to super-charge your sluggish workbook. Use the best practices & formula guidelines described in this post to optimize your complex worksheet models & make them faster.

1. Use tables to hold the data
2. Use named ranges & named formulas
3. Use Dynamic Array formulas
4. Sort your data
5. Use manual calculation mode

… and more. Read on to learn these top 10 tips & ideas to improve performance of your excel formulas.

Advanced Excel Skills are highly sought after. Use this FREE Excel roadmap to learn and grow you Excel skills in 3 months.

Do you manage projects? You are going to LOVE ? this one. In this in-depth tutorial, learn how to create a fully interactive & dynamic Excel Project Management dashboard. Sample files & video instructions are also provided.

9 box grid is a popular method for talent mapping. Download this free excel template for tracking and visualizing your employee performance & potential data.

In this article, I explain about powerful excel features like FILTER(), SORT() and CONCATENATEX() to create a similar 9 box talent map grid for your data.

Ever wanted to create a two-level data validation list? You can use this simple trick to make two-level or cascading drop-down validation lists in Excel. You need some data, a pivot table and simple IF formulas to get this. Read on to understand the process and create your own two-level drop down lists in Excel.

Create a gantt chart with ability to filter by levels. This drill-down gantt chart in Excel is useful for seeing activities by module or team. Read on for full instructions + downloadable template.

Of all the charting features in Excel, Sparklines are my absolute favorite. These bite-sized graphs can fit in a cell and show powerful insights. Edward Tufte coined the term sparkline and defined it as,

intense, simple, word-sized graphics

Sparklines (often called as micro-charts) add rich visualization capability to tabular data without taking too much space. This page provides a complete tutorial on Excel sparklines.

Excel pivot tables are very useful and powerful feature of MS Excel. They are used to summarize, analyze, explore and present your data. In plain English, it means, you can take the sales data with columns like salesman, region and product-wise revenues and use pivot tables to quickly find out how products are performing in each region.

In this tutorial, we will learn what is a pivot table and how to make a pivot table using excel.

Let’s say you are starting at a large dataset with multiple columns. You need to make a pivot report from it for a client or manager. How would you go about it?

Ever wondered how to get percentage of another value in Excel pivot tables, like this: In this tip, learn how to create such calculations using Excel pivot tables. Note: this tip is not compatible with older versions of Excel. If you are using Excel 2007 / 2010 / 2013, then please install free Power Pivot […]

I recently finished a long consulting gig with one of the government ministries in New Zealand. Guess what I was doing? HR Analytics and Reporting. In this post, I want to share my top 5 Excel tips for HR people, based on what I learned in the last 18 months.

Specifically, we will cover:

• Gathering and structuring Employee data in Excel
  • How to use Power Query to collect data
  • Polish / clean data in Power Query
  • Bring cleaner data to Excel as refreshable table
• Answering questions about employees
  • Using Excel formulas such as COUNTIFS, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIFS
  • Pivot tables for data analysis
  • Understanding the results quickly with conditional formatting
• Understanding pay gap
  • Calculating gender pay gap
  • Visualize pay gap
• Creating salary distribution charts
  • Working with histogram charts in Excel 2016 / Office 365
  • Making interactive charts
• Generating letters thru mail merge
  • Calculating employee bonus based on bonus mapping logic
  • Creating 100s of letters with a single click using Mail Merge + Word

Sounds interesting? Read on for details.

Excel table is a series of rows and columns with related data that is managed independently. Excel tables, (known as lists in excel 2003) is a very powerful and supercool feature that you must learn if your work involves handling tables of data.

What is an excel table?

Table is your way of telling excel, “look, all this data from A1 to E25 is related. The row 1 has table headers. Right now we just have 24 rows of data. But I can add more later!”

Ever wanted to count distinct values in your pivot tables? Something like above:

Let’s say you have store sales data. Several products are sold on each day. When you make a pivot table from this data and add product count, Excel counts all products. But we want to see just the distinct count (ie if there is a duplicate product in a day, we want to count it just once).

Here is a simple trick to add distinct count to Excel pivot tables easily.

We all know that Pivot Tables are best thing since avocado on toast. But they can’t slice text values and spread them in a table with Pivots. So how to take a large blob of text and turn it in to something meaningful like above?

Simple, we use Power Query.