Reshaping your data easily – Case study [Pivot tables FTW]
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.
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.
Tell me about an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve with Excel?
Time for a quick show & tell.
Tell me about an analysis problem that you couldn’t solve with Excel?
It can be because you didn’t know how to solve the problem or Excel isn’t the tool for it or any other reason.
Go ahead and speak up. Post your tricky analysis problems in the comments section.
Analyzing 300,000 calls for help [case study]
Over the weekend, I got an email from Mr. E, one of my students. Mr. E works at a police department in California and as part of his work, he was looking at calls received by police. Whenever police get a call for help, multiple teams can respond to the call and go to the location. All of these dispatches are recorded. So a single call can have several such dispatches. And Mr. E wanted to findout which team responded the first. The problem?
Finding the first responded team is tricky.
Today let’s take up this problem as a case study and understand various methods to solve it. We are going to learn about writing better lookups, pivot tables, power pivot and optimization. Put on your helmets, cause this is going to be mind blowingly awesome.
Find out how many times a value is present in a cell [formulas]
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?
How to visualize multiple variables over several years? [Contest]
Our newest contest is inspired from a question asked by Kaushik, one of our forum members, interesting problem.
Need to quickly visualize 3 variables ( Company, years, Financials) in a single […] chart.
Create a chart to understand multiple variable data and you could win $100 Amazon gift card. Do send your charts before 4th of July to qualify for the prizes.
Generating sequence numbers from cluster values [VLOOKUP to the rescue]
Last night I got an email from Joshua, one of our readers with the subject – Hard Excel problem. Hard?!?, at this stage of summer, the hard problems seem to be (in no particular order),
- Lack of good quality mangoes to eat
- Intense heat and humidity
- Lack of good quality mangoes to eat
Yes, I like mangoes.
Any how, back to Joshua’s email, So I got curios and read it. He is facing a curious problem.