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.
Weighted sorting in Excel – video
You may watch this video on our YouTube channel too.
Download weighted sorting example workbook
Click here to download the weighted sort example workbook. Play with the weight formula to learn more.
More on weights & sorting data:
If you are weighed down by multi-column data sets, here are some awesome techniques to reduce your load:
- Weighted average in Excel – how to calculate it?
- Adding interactive sort features to your dashboards – tutorial
- Sorting text values using formulas in Excel
- Index charts – when data ranges all over the place
How do you handle similar sorting situations?
I use weighted sort concepts when working with multi-column data-sets. Most of the time I use simple weight calculation logic.
What about you? How do you sort multi-column data sets? What techniques do you use to calculate weights? Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section.
2 Responses to “Weighted Sorting in Excel ”
Just add a column calculating the "performance" or whatever is your criteria and sort by it? No?
have no patience to waste 13min. Save your time too.
Just thought I would mention, the "weird" custom sort behavior mentioned at 5:45 where "% return" doesn't appear to be sorting is because the "August Purchases" field has the sort preference and since these are such unique values, no additional sorting is possible on the "% return" field. If there were two entries that had the same "Customer Since" year AND the same "August Purchases" amount, THEN you would see a sorting of the "% return" on these two entries.