All articles with 'text processing' Tag

Ever wondered how to go from a bunch of cells with text to one big combined text? Like shown above.

Well, there is a simple trick. One of our readers, Grant shared this with us. Read on to learn this.

Few weeks ago, someone asked me “What are the top 10 formulas?” That got me thinking.

While each of us have our own list of favorite, most frequently used formulas, there is no standard list of top 10 formulas for everyone. So, today let me attempt that.

If you want to become a data or business analyst then you must develop good understanding of Excel formulas & become fluent in them.

A good analyst should be familiar with below 10 formulas to begin with.

Are you ready for an Excel challenge?

Today, your job is very simple. Just find a pattern in a text and return corresponding value.

Your Homework:

In a range we have some resource types & their billing rates.

In another range, we have some descriptions. Each description contains a resource type somewhere inside it. We need to retrieve billing rate for each description by looking up which resource type is mentioned in it.

See above diagram.

The best thing about Excel is that you can do the same thing in several ways. Our yesterdays problem – Extracting file name from full path is no different. There are many different ways to do it, apart from writing a formula. Learn these techniques to be a data extraction ninja.

1. Using find replace
2. Using text to columns
3. Using UDFs

Today lets tackle a very familiar problem. You have a bunch of very long, complicated file names & paths. Your boss wants a list of files extracted from these paths, like below:

Of course nothing is impossible. You just need correct ingredients. I cannot help you with a strong cup of coffee, so go and get it. I will wait…

Back already? well, lets start the formula magic then.

Chandoo is off on Holidays and once again thrown me the keys to Chandoo.org.

So this week we’re going to:

• Pull apart an Array Formula and see what’s under the hood;
• Have a look at a technique for quickly developing Custom Number Formats &
• Look at how we can use HTML Codes in posts at Chandoo.org to spice up your questions and answers.

Today is Tarun’s Problem

“I have got multiple names in each row and would like to have what name is repeated maximum number of times and how many times?”

Today we pull apart an answer to this question and see how it works.

First some good news, On 21st November, 2010, our little blog received its 10,000th comment!

Thank you so much for making this happen.

Those of you reading chandoo.org for a while know my penchant for comments. I have learned a lot of excel tips & ideas just by reading the comments you posted on this blog. I think comments are one of the best parts of this blog. So, naturally, I wanted to celebrate this milestone, with something big & awesome.

My intention was to download all the 10,000+ comments and play with the data to come up with something outstanding, like a dashboard. It took me 2 days to conceptualize and create this beauty.

It is almost 3:30 am now, I stayed awake for last 23 hours so that Excel School 2 can be ready for rolling. But that is no excuse for not having a post here. So here it goes. Excel has formulas for converting a bunch of text to UPPER, lower and Proper Cases. But not […]

Today we will learn to use Excel’s LEFT and FIND formulas. But what fun it is to learn a new formula on a Tuesday? So, we will actually learn to use these formulas to solve the problem: “extract the username from an email ID” How is an email ID structured? Any email ID contains 2 […]

Check out two fabulous implementations of tweetboards in excel. Download the workbooks and play with them yourself. Thanks Fernando and Lee for sharing these workbooks with us.

In this week’s excel links, we will learn how to jump to next cell during data entry, an array formula trick to include all values conditionally, about auto-filters in excel and much more.

In today’s installment of “your week @ PHD” we will learn how to use array formulas to refine text search, a bunch of very useful keyboard shortcuts, and a very simple tip on how to get ready when you want to make a chart. All really juicy tips, so read on.

Jarad asks me in an email “how word frequency can be generated from a range of cells using excel formulas?” This got me thinking and lead to this post, where we learn how to calculate word frequency using array formulas and use it to analyze a bunch of search keywords.

If for every countif() I write excel paid me a dollar, I would be a millionaire by now. It is such a versatile and fun formula to work with that I have decided to write about it as third post in our spreadcheats series. Using COUNTIF() to replace pivot tables: We all know that you […]

If you ever need to know whether a particular word is repeated in a cell (for eg: a file extension or telephone number or name of the customer) here is how you can find it. =if(lower(cell-with-text)<>SUBSTITUTE(lower(cell-with-text),lower(word-to-check),””,2),”Yes”,”No”) We are using substitute() to replace the second occurance of a particular word and then compare this with original […]