so I have an Excel Worksheet with the Mail-Addresses of all resposible persons for the specific items. Some people appear more than once, but when I try =COUNTIF(A2:A9999;A2) and then copy it down, I get the error #VALUE!.
I looked it up, and there is a character limit of 255. I used =LEN(A2) to find out how long the cells were, and they get up to a length of 1500 chars.
Is there still a way to get around that limit, or something else?
Thanks for the help.
Kind regards
Elias
You seem to have two problems: you are dragging down the formula F(A2:A9999,A2) (which causes the formula to modify into F(A3:A10000,A3), F(A4:A10001,A4), ... while you are interested in F(A2:A9999,Ax) for every x. As indicated by Solar Mike, you can solve this using F(A$2:A$9999,Ax).
Next you have the problem with the Countif() limitation. There already is the proposal to shorten your string, e.g. by using LEFT(range,225) but I believe the first thing you should be looking for, is the uniqueness of your data: you are saying that your data are e-mail addresses. Are those e-mail addresses of different companies (which would mean that it might be useful to check the RIGHT() part instead of the LEFT() part?
I would advise you to check those really large addresses (1500 characters long? I've never seen such a long address), try to shorten them and use your CountIf() function on those shortened e-mail addresses.
Related
I'm building a monitoring system that takes a log (where people register their work in a set format) and returns a counter, which I can use for analysis. The monitor and log are two separate workbooks. The log has entries like this: INITALS;DATE;HOUR:RESULT|
Each cell can contain multiple entries.
My first attempt was to do a simple countif and look for a string (note that I use ; instead of , in formulas since I work on a Dutch excel):
=COUNTIF('LOCATION'!Table[LOG];"*NB;??/??/????;??:??:#A*|*")
This worked fine, but the formula only counted the number of cells where this string was present, not the actual number of occurences. I then tried this solution.
=SUM(LEN('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG])-LEN(SUBSTITUTE('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG];"NB";"")))
This indeed counted the number of times "NB" was present in the LOG. However, when I tried to use the original search string, this solution stopped working:
=SUM(LEN('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG])-LEN(SUBSTITUTE('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG];"*NB;??/??/????;??:??:#A*|*";"")))
It seems to me that SUM does not recognize symbols like ? or * which are necessary to define the correct search string. Where did I go wrong? Or can this be solved in another way? I can still look into VBA, but the workbooks are slow as hell already.
"?" and "*" are wildcards. Some functions support these (like COUNTIFS()) where others don't. Like you found out, SUBSTITUTE() does not.
Here is one way to count, assuming ms365:
Formula in C1:
=REDUCE(0,A1:A2,LAMBDA(a,b,a+LET(X,SEQUENCE(LEN(b)),SUM(--(IFERROR(SEARCH("NB;??/??/????;??:??:#A*|*",b,X),0)=X)))))
Note: I removed the asterisk in front of "NB" just to make searching for a position valid in comparison to what i called variable "X".
I have a pretty large data set I with adresses and postal codes, and I need to organize said data set by postal codes only, which resulted in a large number of variables.
The code goes like this (it continues for a long while, but in order to shorten it for easier access and reading:
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("NEPAL";F2));RIGHT(F2;5);IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("MALTA";F2));RIGHT(F2;5);IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("SWITZERLAND";F2));RIGHT(F2;5);IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("CHINA";F2));RIGHT(F2;5);IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("CHILE";F2));RIGHT(F2;5);"OTHER"))))))
I had to translate the formula since I'm using EXCEL in Portuguese.
TL'DR: My formula hit the character limit (it's a lot bigger than what's above) and I still have some variables I need to add to the formula (eg.):
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("ANGOLA";F2));RIGHT(F2;6)
and other variables with the same functions.
If anyone could help me shorten the string, I would appreciate it!
Used the solution sugested by #Rory and it worked perfectly for what I wanted! Thank you all!
I don't know why every time I fall in love with a program because I found it very useful at first use, but I end up always struggling of its stupidity after a depth use.
So, my journey begins with the excel function "Merge & Center" that warns me that it will only keep the top left value and delete the others, which is very stupid because I can no longer drag a function in a cell to the others, did no one in this planet suggested that it will be way easier to keep the same value in each merged cells or to put at least a simple checkbox to give the user the option to choose between the two outcomes.
Ok, before I come to this forum I did some research, found a lot of VBA codes, tricks, methods but none gave me the satisfaction that I'm looking for, I concluded that it's impossible to merge and keep values in cells, so can someone please explain to me why Microsoft didn't think of that?
Here is a simple example of what I'm looking for:
enter image description here
As you came to understand, merged cells are Excel's and VBA's worst nightmares! Avoid them (since they also make for terrible datastructures) if you can.
If you must use them and you need a function you can drag down, you'll need to make sure you create a mechanic that can skip certain rows. INDEX() is able to retrieve values with a 2nd parameter that tells the function which row you would like from a given array. If we make sure that this 2nd parameter has a steady incline we can still retrieve the correct values:
Formula in C1:
=INDEX(A:A,ROW()-1-MOD(ROW()-1,3)+1)&B1
After searching all over the internet, I didn't find the perfect solution, so I started learning VBA and I made this beautiful function, it detects if cells are merged or not and if so then it returns the top cell value.
Function Merg(CellRef As Range) As String
Dim MainCell As String
If CellRef.MergeCells Then
MainCell = Left(CellRef.MergeArea.Address, InStr(1,CellRef.MergeArea.Address, ":") - 1)
Else
MainCell = CellRef.Address
End If
Merg = Range(MainCell).Value
End Function
I don't know how to display the code properly on Stackoverflow. It's always a nightmare for me to understand the mechanics, you can visit my same thread on Microsoft Forum.
I have a dictionary containing lots of words - I want the user to be able to input a list of substrings, and then a filtered list will be updated, containing only words that contain those substrings and nothing else. Any words that contain extra characters the user didn't specify, should not appear. Cell F3 will use a FILTER function to create the list. As in the mock-up below:
What I need is a formula that would generate the TRUE or FALSE flags from the yellow section (B3:B9), but I'm not sure how to go about this.
I'm sure this could be solved by VBA or Regex using Google Sheets, but I want to know if there's a way to do this by formula, as I don't want this to require a button press or script execution, and my spreadsheet can't be hosted on Google sheets due to its size. Any ideas?
You can also use a combination of ISNUMBER and SUMPRODUCT:
=ISNUMBER(SUMPRODUCT(MATCH(MID(A3,ROW(INDEX(A:A,1,1):INDEX(A:A,LEN(A3),1)),1),$D$3:$D$5,0)))
Adjusted formula:
=ISNUMBER(SUMPRODUCT(MATCH(MID(A3,ROW(A$1:INDEX(A:A,LEN(A3))),1),$D$3:$D$5,0)))
The result:
The test being ran below is subtracting each instance of your dictionary from the length of original string. If the result is 0, this returns TRUE. If not, this returns FALSE. This is not case sensitive - a & A will be treated equally here.
=NOT(LEN(A1)-(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),D1,"")))-(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),D2,"")))-(LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(UPPER(A1),D3,""))))
The equation works fine although I don't know if it is an optimal solution for you, but posting as answer in case it is for somebody else. The issue with this approach is the equation gets longer and longer for each character you add to your dictionary. Depending on the size of dictionary and strings to test against, this can get sloppy and calc heavy really quick.
Have you considered a UDF in VBA?
Seems like it would be a simple thing really (and it may be), but I'm trying to take the string data of a column and then through a calculated column, replace all the spaces with %20's so that the HTML link in the workflow produced email will actually not break off at the first space.
For example, we have this in our source column:
file:///Z:/data/This is our report.rpt
And would like to end up with this in the calculated column:
file:///Z:/data/This%20is%20our%20report.rpt
Already used the REPLACE, and made up a ghastly super nested REPLACE/SEARCH version, but the problem there is that you have to nest for EACH potential space, and if you don't know how many up front, it doesn't work, or will miss some.
Have any of you come across this scenario and how did you handle it?
Thanks in advance!
As far as I know there is no generic solution using the calculated-column syntax. The standard solution for this situation is using an ItemAdded (/ItemUpdated) event and initializing the field value from code.
I was able to solve this issue for my circumstances by using a series of calculated columns.
In the first calculated column (C1) I entered a formula to remove the first space, something like this:
=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND(" ",[Title])),REPLACE([Title],FIND(" ",[Title]),1,"%20"),[Title])
In the second Calculated column (C2) I used:
=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND(" ",[C1])),REPLACE([C1],FIND(" ",[C1]),1,"%20"),[C1]).
In my case, I wanted to encode upto four spaces, so I used 3 calculated columns (C1, C2, C3) in the same fashion and got the desired result.
This is not as efficient as using a single calculated column, but if SUBSTITUTE will not work in your SharePoint environment, and you cannot use an event handler or workflow, it may offer a workable alternative.
I actually used a slightly different formula, but it was on a work machine to which I don't have access at the moment, so I just grabbed this formula from a similar S.O. question. Any formula that will replace the first occurrence of a space with "%20" will work, the trick is to a) make sure the formula returns the original string unchanged if it does not have more spaces in it, and b) test, test, test. Create a view of your list that has the field you are trying to encode, plus the calculated fields, and see if you are getting the results you want.
so that the HTML link in the workflow produced email will actually not break off at the first space.
The browser only does this if you have not enclosed your link in quotes
If you wrap the link in quotes, it does not cut off at the first space
In a SharePoint Formula it would be:
="""file:///Z:/data/This is our report.rpt"""
becuase two quotes are the SP escape notation to output a quote
You can use this formula (Start trim for 1, in my case was 4):
=IF(ISBLANK([EUR Amount]),"",(TRIM(MID([EUR Amount],4,2))&TRIM(MID([EUR Amount],6,2))&TRIM(MID([EUR Amount],8,2))&TRIM(MID([EUR Amount],10,2))&TRIM(MID([EUR Amount],12,2))&TRIM(MID([EUR Amount],14,2)))*1)