I have two columns called Primary Source and Secondary Source in MS Excel. I was wondering if there is anyway I could connect these 2 columns with each other i.e, if I select something from Primary Source, the corresponding value or the various options under that head must be shown in Secondary Source.
Thanks!!!
You provide very little information about your spreadsheet. I think you are after dependent data validation, where the first cell offers a choice of, say "Continent" and you can select "America", "Africa", "Asia", "Europe", etc. and after you have made a selection, the next cell will present a choice of countries in the selected continent.
If that is what you want to do, take a look at dependent data validation at Debra Dalgleish's site here:
http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal02.html
It involves setting up named ranges for the different options and using Indirect() to create the source for the secondary validation list.
Related
I have a table with several column having the same name.
This columns is updated and provided regularly to power bi.
The columns has several columns with the same name such as "Result", "Result" and do so on...
However, Power BI adds each time in an automated way a number after my columns.
When I try to "force" power bi not to have a number, I get the following message
"The name "Result" is already used for a column..."
How could I change this?
The only way would be for the people using my file to extract the data and correct the name manually in excel...which is not great
You cannot edit this behavior, PowerBI needs an unique identifier to reference the data, therefore the column name must be unique within a table (the complete identifier is given by table + column), otherwise the tool won't be able to reference the data.
This rule usually applies to any tool that manages data and sometimes to the data themselves (that's up to the format though). How can the tool get data from "Result" if more than one column has this identifier? which is the right one? The tool does not know and based on the context can give you an error or will fix this issue itself by making the names unique.
Note that also excel will append numbers to the columns (with the same name names) if you put the data in a proper table (insert-> table), in fact, an excel sheet can be considered unstructured free data, meanwhile, an excel table will enforce the data structure.
Most tools (like PowerBI) will also enforce data types.
I'm in the processing of creating a report for the company I work at that has a rather complicated survey export file that needs to have the data extracted in meaningful ways.
The table headers are as follow https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Et9Pg6k9CJA3HTO0aHcnSnOWVU05bmHYUsPS0wB2Nr8/edit?usp=sharing
It has respondents listing there top 3 most important options and the rest are left blank.
If anyone can help me figure out a way to potentially summarize this in a pivot table that would be great.
You're data is in a crosstab. Pivot's don't like that kind of layout. You need to unpivot your data.
If you've got the PowerQuery add-in installed (or have Excel 2016 or Excel/Office 365 subscription) then you can use PowerQuery to do this. Google "PowerQuery" and "Unpivot" and you'll turn up a whole heap of videos.
Otherwise you can use VBA such as my Unpivot routine I've previously blogged about at http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2013/11/21/unpivot-shootout/
As always it depends what questions you want to ask in your analysis. Here are two suggestions.
What are the commonest first/second/third choices?
This assumes that the ranking is important, i.e. the first choice is ranked significantly higher than the second choice, so you want to analyse them separately.
You could add three extra columns to your data using this formula to convert the first choice to a single variable with 11 categories
=IFERROR(MATCH(COLUMNS($A:A),$A3:$K3,0),"")
in L3 and likewise with the second and third choices in M3 and N3.
in the event that a respondent (row) has less than three choices, it will give a blank for the second and/or third choice.
What are the commonest choices regardless of ranking?
This assumes that the ranking isn't so important - you just want to know which columns have been picked overall.
=INDEX($L$3:$N$10,INT((ROWS($1:1)-1)/3)+1,MOD(INT(ROWS($1:1)-1),3)+1)
In N3. This would have to pulled down for 3N rows, where N is the number of rows in the original dataset.
Then it would be a simple case of setting up pivot tables or charts for the four new variables.
I have a little bit of an Excel problem and would be happy about any suggestions.
Long version: I have a dataset with raw data representing journal entries. The structure of this dataset can be seen here:
Now, what I want to achieve is to assign each row/each journal entry to a cost category (marketing, personnel, IT, depreciation, …) based on the values in the account number, type, and cost center rows, and, in a second step, break down the categories once more, eg. for labour costs, distinguish between direct and indirect labour costs.
The way my company does this right now is using an Excel sheet with several macros where the criteria are hardcoded in the VBA code to loop through the whole list, check if a row matches the criteria for a certain cost category, and if it does, copy the row to a new sheet (having one new sheet for each category), then using a second macro to break down the categories, assigning values to the “description”-column which is empty initially based on another set of criteria. Then, pivot tables are used on each of the new sub-datasets to calculate sums for each sub-category. These sums are finally used as input data for a management report (as seen in the image above) which is the ultimate goal of this whole ordeal.
Now, not only does this seem overly complicated to me and running the macros and manually adjusting the input ranges for the pivot tables takes forever, but also the criteria for allocating the costs can change quite often, and opening the VBA editor and changing the code is not really user-friendly.The initial idea was to maybe include some helper columns (one for each cost category) and somehow create an indicator variable being one of the entry falls in the respective category, and zero otherwise, and then use these columns for further calculations (e.g. for Sumifs and such).
The problem is that a) combinations of account number and type are not unique, so that one account number can go along with various types, and one type can go along with various account numbers, so the criteria can be something like C6 = 544300 OR 544700 AND D6<>110246, etc. And b) criteria can change, meaning sometimes a new account number or type is added that also has to be assigned to an already existing category such as labor costs, which would make it necessary to include that criterion in all the formulas for that particular cost category. So, is it possible to somehow create a criteria table for each category that serves as input for some sort of IF/SUMIF or lookup function?
Short version: I have a data set (can range from 5000 to up to 100000 rows, 8 columns) where I want to perform a lookup, but based on various criteria. And, in addition to that, it would be nice if the criteria could somehow be drawn from a separate list so that they can be modified fairly easily without having to change the formula itself. Is there a way to do so? Or do you think using the advanced filter might be the most suitable option?
I am trying to write a calculated member which acts differently depending on whether the user is filtering by that member or has it dragged down as rows or columns on their pivot table (using Excel).
The rules are:
1. If the user is using the date dimensin as a Report Filter in Excel, then the calculated member should get the maximum date out of all dates that they are filtered by.
2. If they have the date dimension as rows on the pivot table, then I need to apply ClosingPeriod and some other logic.
Please try this. The idea came from here.
Basically the dynamic named set represents what's in the report filters. And the EXISTING keyword trims the list of days down to the filter context of the current cell letting you detect say if one month is on rows. Compare counts and you can detect what the user did.
CREATE HIDDEN DYNAMIC SET CURRENTCUBE.SelectedDays as
[Date].[Date].[Date].Members;
CREATE MEMBER CURRENTCUBE.[Measures].[My Calc] as
CASE
WHEN SelectedDays.Count > {existing [Date].[Date].[Date].Members}.Count
THEN Tail({existing [Date].[Date].[Date].Members},1).Item(0).Item(0).Name
WHEN SelectedDays.Count < [Date].[Date].[Date].Members.Count
THEN Tail(SelectedDays,1).Item(0).Item(0).Name
END
Performance is going to not be good. And I suspect users will be confused with the results of your calc. If you want to describe the business scenario more I can maybe recommend a better approach.
I have multiple spreadsheets that all have different data. I tried multiple consolidation ranges but it didn't let me select the data I wanted.
I have 2 columns in each spreadsheet (many) with the same table title that I want to use (they are not in the same place in each sheet, and are only one of many columns - this cannot be changed). I still want to combine them without manually copying them as this takes too much time.
I have "Quality" and "Date". For "Quality" I have "Good" and "Bad". I want to be able to create a pivot where I can select "Quality: Good/Bad" as the report filter, then show the dates in the first column below and a count on the right (so I can see if there has been any new "Bad" ones for example in the later dates, like "Ah, a new date has appeared, and there is two new bad ones).
Can this even be done? I have twisted and turned and not come up with anything but errors.
Pivot tables will only take data form one source.
If you're desperate to use Powerpivot, then your options are either to:
A: Create a "master" table that pulls all the data into one place
B: use Powerpivot, as it can use data from more than one source.
Difficulty here is of course learning a completely new program and syntax (dax is similar but very different to Excel's formulaic language)
If you go down the powerpivot route, I found ExcelIsFun's tutorials on youtube incredibly useful.