Keep Calm and Power BI [Breathing Exercise Vizzes]
We are in the midst of my Power BI Play Date course launch. I have opened the enrollments for this program last week and there is a tremendous response to this program. To celebrate the new course launch and show you the lighter side of it, let me share a few breathing exercises built in Power BI.
VLOOKUP that fat table with ease [3 quick tips]
Time for some good, old fashioned VLOOKUP love. Let’s say you are writing VLOOKUP()s to get data from an unusually fat table, ie one with heaps of columns. You want to get to lookup ID in first column and get thingamajig in what is that column number. Well, better get counting from 1 and after 19 seconds and lots of squinting you arrive at column number 53 – which has thingamajig.
If this sounds like your VLOOKUP routine, check out these three amazingly simple tips to save some time and effort with your lookups.
Awesome chart to visualize Salary Increases for 3,500+ people [Tutorial]
Game for some charting awesomeness?
Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.
Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?
How about the one above?
Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.
Employee Performance Panel Charts in Power BI with R
Yesterday we saw a beautiful example of panel charts with R. Today let me show you how to create the same (or even better) with Power BI & R. What you need: Power BI Desktop and R Raw data set – rem-data.csv Creating Panel Charts in Power BI with R Load CSV data in to […]
Use File > Info to quickly unprotect multiple worksheets [Quick tips]
Ever had a workbook with multiple protected worksheets? May be you are enterprise architect at Death Star or chief strategist at Mordor and got all the plans in a tidy little but protected workbook. Of course, you hate having to unprotect many of the worksheets every time you have a new evil plan for world domination. Don’t you worry, you can use this handy little trick to unproect en masse.
- Just open the workbook
- Go to File > Info
- Right on the top, you can see all protected worksheets and a link to unprotect them.
- Click to unprotect the ones you want to.
- Done.
Extract currency amounts from text – Power Query Tutorial
Let’s say you got some text values and want to extract the amounts from them. Something like above.
How to go about it?
We could use a variety of techniques to extract the values.
- Formulas – not easy given the unstructured nature of data. But almost possible. See this for an example.
- VBA – possible, read this forum discussion few ways to do it.
- Power Query – at first glance it might seem tricky, but PQ makes this all too easy. Read on.
Modelling Inventory Run Rate & Cash Flows using Excel
Imagine you run an office furniture company. You want to stop reordering two brands of furniture – Relaxer (a type of chair) and Boca Top (a type of table). You currently have 20,000 Relaxer chairs and 5,000 Boca Tops. These are valued at $200,000 and $100,000 respectively. When sold, they will yield $100,000 and $25,000 gross profit. You are hoping to sell them off in 2 or 3 years. You forecast that we can sell off these as per some yearly schedule.
You need to analyze this and prepare a cash flow model.
Let’s learn how to answer such open ended questions using various analysis techniques in Excel.