All articles with 'pivot tables' Tag

Ever wanted to make a cool, snazzy interactive chart in Excel? Something like this:

In this tutorial, learn all about making your very first interactive chart. We use both formulas and pivot tables to build two versions of an awesome interactive chart in Excel.

Pivot tables are fun, easy and super useful. Except, they can be ugly when it comes to presentation. Here is a quick way to make a pivot look more like a report.

• Just type over the headers / total fields to make them user friendly.

See this quick demo to understand what I mean:

So simple and effective.

Yesterday, my mate from across the ditch, Hui posted about conditional rank formula (RANKIFS) using awesome SUMPRODUCT

Of course, not everyone can whip up a sumproduct formula like that. On a scale of One to Hui of Excel awesomeness, you would need to be at least an H to write sumproduct or countifs formulas shown in that post. So does it mean, you can’t conditional rank if you don’t know your X from L?

Don’t worry. We got you covered. You can still get your conditional ranks, without inception level array formulas. Simple, use pivot tables instead.

Time for some statistics and charting fun. Let’s learn all about histograms and Pareto charts in Excel 2016. You will learn

• What, why and when?
• How to set up and customize histograms
• How to use Pareto charts?
• How to create dynamic histograms?
• Creating histograms in old Excel (2013 or prior versions)

Sounds interesting? Let’s get started then.

Recently, I had to make a bunch of panel charts. After wrangling with Excel (and a tiny bit of VBA) to create them, I wondered if we are suffering needlessly by being too loyal to Excel. I switched to R and could create these panel charts in almost no time (well, first I had to learn how to pivot the data using dplyr). Today, let me share the experience.

Over on Twitter, I came across this beautiful chart, aptly titled – Joyplot. It is the kind of chart that makes you all curious and awed. So I did what any Excel nerd would do. Recreated it in Excel of course. This post takes you thru the process.

Take a look at final outcome above. Read on to learn more.

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.

In this amazing guest post, the winner of our 2016 dashboard contest – Chandeep – Explains how he constructed the jaw dropping beauty (shown above) using Excel, creativity, love and sweat. Grab a full cup of coffee (or whatever liquid fancies you) and read on. Take lots of notes and play with the ideas in Excel while reading to maximize your learning.

Thanks Chandeep.

Pivot tables are lovely. But sometimes they are hard to work with. Let’s say you are analyzing some HR data and want to see number of weeks worked in each hour classification.

And you want this.

Except, there is a teeny tiny problem.

The sort order on the classification is all messed up.

Here is a quick fix to get custom sort order on your pivot table row labels.

First a quick personal update: There has been a magnitude 7.8 earth quake in NZ on 14th November 2016 early morning. It is centered in Kaikoura, which is about 250 km away from Wellington. We did feel several shakes and after shocks. It has been an interesting and often scary experience. But my family is safe. I feel very sad for the all the damage and the loss for families in NZ. If you suffered from this quake, My prayers and thoughts are with you.

Yesterday, a friend asked me an interesting question. He has school distance data, like above. He wants to know which is the closest school for each school.

There are a few ways to answer this question. Let’s examine two approaches – formulas & pivot tables and see the merits of both.

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.

It is election time in USA, and that means there is a whole lot of drama, discussions and of course data analysis. There are tons of cool visualizations published on all the data. Previously, we talked about “How Trump happened” chart.

Today let’s take a look at the beautiful decision tree chart by NY Times explaining what would happen if each of the 10 swing states vote for Democrats or Republicans. Go ahead and look at that chart. And when you are done playing with it, come back.

My first thought after looking at the chart is: Wow, that is cool. I wonder how we can recreate that experience in Excel?

But as you can guess, making a dynamic tree visualization in Excel is pretty hard. You can create a bubble chart mixed with XY chart to show all the nodes of the decision tree, but as this tree has 2^10 nodes at the bottom level (and 2^11-1 total nodes) our chart would look very clumsy and busy.

So, instead of replicating NY Times chart, why not make our own version that explains the data? You can reuse this idea when visualizing outcomes of several what-if scenarios.

Anyone who has made a pivot table and their grandma knows that formatting them is a pain. Let’s recap the steps to apply one of the most common formats – currency format.

1. Right click on any value field
2. Go to Value field settings
3. Click on “Number Format” button
4. Choose Currency format
5. Close the boxes, one after another

Unless you get paid per click, you wont be happy with all those clicks.

Wouldn’t it be cool to just click once and apply most common format to your pivot fields?

Of course you can. Just add oneClickCurrency macro to your personal macros workbook. And then add this to your Home ribbon as a custom button and you have a one click format option for any pivot.

Time for a quick but very useful tip. Ever wanted to create all combinations from two (or more) lists? a la Cartesian product of both lists.

Here is a ridiculously simple way to do it.

Wellington(NZ) sure is beautiful on a clear day. There are so many cool bike tracks, walking trails and beaches to keep you busy. Today, I went cycling on my usual route towards Makara beach. At the turn off point, I thought, “This is selfish. I can’t keep all this beauty to myself. I must share it with you.” So here we go.

A quick video about data analysis while on bike

Technically, I was not on bike when recording this video.  Watch it below or on our YouTube Channel.