Have your heard of Smart Lookup? Don’t confuse it with Excel Functions. It is nothing related to formula writing in Excel. Simply consider it is a web search engine (Bing) embedded in Excel.
Watch it in action, and you will see!
HERE’s the description from Office.com about Smart Lookup.
This is something cool, with no doubt. It will become greatonly when you’ve found a practical Use Case of it.
Last Friday was a public holiday in Hong Kong. Yes, a long weekend! Guess what I dd over the long weekend? I’ve created a playlist – “Excel Magic in One Minute” on my YouTube Channel.
The name says it all – it’s about bite-size Excel tricks that you can consume in ONE MINUTE. Continue reading →
We have a table that we would like to apply color banding based on groups. We can achieve this by inserting a helper column to identify the sequence of each group, with the following formula:
In C2, input
=IF(A1=A2,C1,SUM(C1,1)) ‘copy down
and then apply conditional formatting based on the sequence.
Select the range A2:C29, then apply this formula to conditional formatting:
=ISEVEN($C2) ‘note the usage of $
Here’s the result! It works great… until you apply a filter on subset.
Why is that?
Because we are referring to a static (even) number for the color banding. The number won’t response to the filter. After the filter, only subsets of even number will be highlighted. @_@
The desired result
We want the color banding to be responsive to filter, like the screen cast below:
With some twists to the formula for the helper column, this can be done magically.
This is a continuation of the previous post, in which I showed you how to unstack two columns of data by using Pivot Table as a helper, and together with a couple of excel tricks. As mentioned, that approach is only good for one-off as the result is static. When you expect the data to be changed frequently; or will have new data added to it on regular basis, you would absolutely look for a more robust solution that can be updated easily. With Power Query, a simple act of Refresh will bring you the result in a flash. Continue reading →
Another commonly seen problem in daily work. Many hours are spent on reshaping data, we all know that. Nevertheless, if you are good in Excel, doing this task is not difficult at all. Indeed, there are many ways to solve this problem.
In the following video, I am going to demonstrate how to solve this problem using a Pivot Table as helper steps. This approach is quick and dirty, which can be accomplished in a minute or two. However, as I said, it’s quick and dirty so you will expect limitation for this approach – it’s for one-off only. Whenever your data changes, you have to do it again.
Last week, I showed you how to split cell contents separated by line feed into rows with Power Query. That was easy when we are dealing with only one column. If you don’t know how, you may read the post here before you continue.
When we have two columns, like the screenshot below, it’s getting a bit complicating… but still very easy with Power Query. It just requires a few more steps.
“My Excel reports take way too long to update each month/week”
“I spend hours collating and cleaning data, updating formulas and charts and then no one reads my reports anyway, what’s the point?”
“If I could just impress the boss I’d get that pay rise/promotion I deserve”
“I need to get my Excel skills up to date so I can stand out from the crowd of other job applicants”
“I’m not sure how to approach setting up my Excel workbook the right way, so it’s easy to build and maintain”
Then you should spend an hour, or even three hours, to watch the free Excel Dashboard Webinars by Microsoft Excel MVP, Mynda Treacy. Continue reading →
After an in-house training, a colleague came to me and asked if there is a way to do the following:
The problem here is the contents in cells are separated by a line feed (line break). A cell may contain two to five items and we want to split them into individual cells, into rows.
Although I used a trick of using Text to Columns to solve the problem before, this time the situation is different. First, I want the cell contents to be split into rows, and unfortunately, we don’t have Text to Rows in Excel. Second, we have more than one cells with this kind of unstructured data. 😦
This could be a nightmare for most Excel users.
But you know what, with Power Query, this can be solved at ease. 🙂
It is a common task to compare two lists in Excel. This can be achieved with MATCH function. But what if you want to compare a list of filenames stored in your spreadsheet, with the files you’ve got in a folder?
Will you do it manually, by eyeballing? @_@
The first challenge is to get the list of files you have in the folder. The second challenge is that fact that you will receive files and put them into the folder from time to time. In other words, the folder content is changing. You absolutely want a dynamic solution that helps you to monitor the status at ease, so that you know which files are missing.
While SUMMING data is probably the most common task in Excel, I am surprised that many people are not aware of this Excel feature – AutoSum. It is super handy especially when you know the shortcut of it, which is ALT+=.
Let’s watch it in action:
Tip: When you make the selection, make sure you have selected an “extra” row and/or column to reside the total(s).
Get multiple filter criteria with Excel Auto-Filter
This post is in response to the following Mr.Excel video
where Mr. Excel Bill Jelen solved the problem with Advanced Filter.
Indeed I got a similar question from a colleague recently for filtering multiple criteria on a single column. This is perfect timing to write this post to demonstrate a less-known feature of Auto-Filter.
First of all, have you ever noticed the “Add current selection to filter?
Maybe yes maybe no. Even though you have seen it before, you may have no idea what it does. Let’s explore it now.
Here’s the situation
We have a list of account numbers (that are stored as text). What we want to achieve is to filter all account number that starts with either 6, 7, or 8.
Flash Fill was introduced in Excel 2013. After 6 years, it is still a hidden gem of modern Excel that most regular Excel users do not even know its existence. Whenever I show to my colleagues what Flash Fill is capable of, they are all impressed and think that this is their “Greatest Discovery” moment.
So in this post, I am going to show you in a flash what Flash Fill can do with 16 examples.
Here’s the video on my YouTube channel. Please turn on CC for English subtitles.
If you prefer reading to watching, you will see GIFs showing the examples below:
Note: CTRL+E is the keyboard shortcut for Flash Fill which had been used in all the GIFs in the coming demonstration.
Long time ago, I wrote a blog post How much do I need to pay? which was not really related to Excel but calculation of a random daily event. Similar to that old story, a friend asked me for an Excel solution for a different scenario, which I think is quite interesting and really need Excel to do the calculation.
Long story short – when we have more than one birthday stars in a party, maybe a birthday star should treat other birthday star(s) as well. Thus, s/he will need to pay a share. WOW… it sounds like an Excel challenge that I really like to take.
In the previous blog post, we see how Flash Fill extracts First Name and Last Name from an email address in a format shown above. I’ve also recorded a video for that post.
Flash Fill is so smart to detect the pattern of CamalCase and return the desired result in a flash. However, if you are still using Excel 2010 or before, it is NO EASY TASK and required advanced skills in formula writing. The key challenge is to identify the position of the second CAPITAL letter in the text string. Once we have identified the position of it, getting the First Name and Last Name is totally manageable.
Here’s the formula to identify the position of the second CAPITAL LETTER:
{=MATCH(TRUE,CODE(MID(A2,ROW(INDIRECT("2:"& FIND("@",A2)-1)),1))<=90,0)+1}
Note: This is an array formula, requiring Ctrl+Shift+Enter
Without a single input in formula bar. UI only. No kidding!
What’s even more unbelievable? The above can be done in just a couple of minutes.
The technique discussed in this blog post is applicable to Excel 2016 or later. And the techniques used are mainly Flash Fill and Quick Analysis, which are available since Excel 2013. But why I said it’s applicable to Excel 2016 or later? Because the chart types Histogram and Pareto were introduced in Excel 2016.
I am not saying that we cannot perform the above transformation using Excel 2013/2010. It’s just a matter of time + higher skill level is required.
Glad to share with you my second video here. This video is about how to plot a compelling to compare Actual vs. Budget, Target and Last Year data. The written instruction is available in previous post – A compelling chart in three minutes…
I spent more or less the same amount of time (~12 hours in total, on and off) to produce it comparing to the first video. However this video is 8-minute long, which is eight times longer than the first one. In a way, I am doing it more efficiently. 🙂
Honestly it takes much more time and effort than writing a blogpost. After making just two videos, I can imagine the GREAT efforts all other Excel geniuses like ExcelIsFun, MrExcel.com, Leila Gharani, Excel On Fire (just to name a few) they have put on their channels, where you will find a lot of great Excel videos. Really appreciate their efforts! 👍 Indeed they have inspired me a lot through my Excel journey.
I am not dreaming about my channel will become as popular as theirs. Though I do hope, my channel will get more popularity from time to time, especially in the Cantonese-speaking communities. My goal is to produce one to two videos per month. Should you have any comments/suggestions, please leave your comments.
Last but not least, if you like my video, please SUBSCRIBE my channel.
you need to plot chart to show actual sales vs budget, target, and LY sales;
agree that the chart on the right is a better visualization such purpose;
want to know how to create the chart on the right;
Then
please continue to read this post.
In business world, we often compare actual sales to various benchmarks such as budget, target, and last year. In this post, I am going to show you step-by-step how to make a compelling chart for this purpose. This is basically a simplified version of bullet chart, and is super-easy to create. I hope you find it useful and relevant.
Kung Hey Fat Choi! This week is Chinese New Year. I wish you a fruitful, healthy, and rewarding Year of Pig!
I have almost one week off for CNY holiday. I have cleaned my PC and spared 50G+ space in the hard drive; got a new fantastic video production and editing tool; and more importantly produced my first Excel video and posted it on YouTube.
Indeed, I have been thinking about the topics for making my first video. There are a few on my list but I could not decide. Then all a sudden when I was having shower one day (yes… many ideas come from 🚿), an idea came to my mind: Why don’t make my first video for my top blogpost – When unhide row doesn’t work…? That’s why we have this video: Continue reading →
Chinese New Year is coming really soon. Let’s talk about something about “New” in Excel in this post… but don’t make me wrong, I am not talking about any new features in Excel 2016/2019/365. Indeed, what I am going to discuss about is a feature that exists for a long long time, but not many people are using it (at least not to the people I work with).
Interestingly, this “New” stuff is very common and I believe all Excel users have used it at the most fundamental way.
Still have no idea what I am talking about? Watch the following:
Note: All screenshots are prepared using Excel for Office 365
Disclosure: The author earns a small amount of commission (at no additional cost to you) for the product/service successfully sold through the links of [Affiliate].
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