Speed up your Excel Formulas [10 Practical Tips]
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.
Sorting values in Olympic Medal Table style [Quick Tip]
It is Olympic season. Everyone I know is tracking the games and checking their country’s performance. One thing that we notice when looking at medal tally is,
A single Gold medal is worth more than any number of Silver medals. Like wise, a single Silver medal is worth more than any number of Bronze medals.
So, when you look at the ranking of countries, you see countries with single Gold medal higher up than countries with lots of Silver and Bronze medals (but no Gold).
How to sort left to right in Excel (quick tip)
Imagine you are in a life sustaining planet named Pearth, in another galaxy. One day you got to work, fired up Excel (hey, what else would you use? Excel is the best data software in any galaxy 🙂 ) and started working.
You came across a dataset that need sorting, but left to right – horizontally.
Now what? Do you turn your monitor sideways?
Excel Tables Tutorial & 13 Tips for making you a Data Guru
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!”
Sorting to your Pivot table row labels in custom order [quick tip]
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.
Weighted Sorting in Excel [video]
Imagine you are looking customer data like below and want to sort them by performance. If you sort the data by any one column, you will not get full picture of performance. To understand which customers rank low on performance, you need to defined a weighed sort, the kind of sort where you assign weights to each attribute (customer age, recent purchases and rate of returns) and come up with single score to sort them all.
Sounds interesting? Watch below video to understand how to do weighted sorting in Excel.
A better chart to visualize “Best places to live” – Top 100 cities comparison Excel chart
Recently, I saw this chart on Economist website.
It is trying to depict how various cities rank on livability index and how they compare to previous ranking (2014 vs 2009).
As you can see, this chart is not the best way to visualize “Best places to live”.
Few reasons why,
- The segregated views (blue, gray & red) make it hard to look for a specific city or region
- The zig-zag lines look good, but incredibly hard to understand % changes (or absolute changes)
- Labels are all over the place, thus making data interpretation hard.
- Some points have no labels (or ambiguous labels) leading to further confusion.
After examining the chart long & hard, I got thinking.
Its no fun criticizing someones work. Creating a better chart from this data, now thats awesome.