Microsoft Office

Excel – Conditional Formatting with Subtotals

If there has ever been a more “You’ve got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” moment, it’s the blending of Conditional Formatting with the Subtotals tool in Excel.

If you have ever used the Subtotals tool to group information you have probable been impressed with its ability to group data by some changing event (like States) and have those groups aggregated and then structured into a collapsible outline.

Before Subtotals

CondFmt1

After Subtotals

CondFmt2

But the one shortfall when it comes to the Subtotals tool is that there are no built-in artistic styles that can be applied to give the list a bit of pizazz.

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Using Excel MODE Function to Return a Text Response

Excel’s MODE function is a great tool for returning the most frequently occurring number in a set of numbers.  But what if you want to return the most frequently occurring word in a list of words?

MODE with Numbers

Using the MODE function in Excel is quite simple; you point to a list of numbers and MODE will tell you which number occurs the most often.

Mode1

In this list, the number “4” appears more often than any other number.

MODE with Words

As you can see, the MODE function does not work very well when pointing to a list of words.

Mode2

The function returns a “#N/A” error message.

Not to fear; MODE can be made to return words, but it take the combined efforts of SEVERAL functions, none of which are MODE!  (How odd does THAT sound?)

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Excel – Mixed Pivot Table Layout

Excel – Mixed Pivot Table Layout

Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables is one of the greatest inventions known to man; second only to those buttery mints they bring you in fancy restaurants.  Even the greatest of ideas are not without their issues.  Take for example the Report Layout feature in Pivot Tables.  Excel gives the user three options with which to display hierarchically (wow; that’s a hard word to spell) related data.

  • Compact Form
  • Outline Form
  • Tabular Form

Let’s examine what makes each layout unique.

Compact Form

All row-based data is combined into a single column, one row per line item, and indented to reflect the position within the hierarchy.

PivotLayout01

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Excel – Convert Names to Email Addresses

Converting Names into Email Addresses

Suppose you have a list of names, perhaps a roster of employee names, and you wish to generate email addresses for these individuals. If you work at a company that has an established standard for email addresses (i.e. first initial of first name with last name) then you have a few options. The preferred strategy depends largely on the version of Excel you are using as well as the naming pattern used in the emails addresses.

Flash Fill (Excel 2013 / Excel 2016)

If you are not familiar with Flash Fill, this tool allows you to type a pattern next to existing data and Flash Fill will repeat the pattern for the remaining data but on a per-record/per-line basis.

Let us take a look at the following example:

You have a list of first and last names and you wish to convert those names to an email format that takes the first letter of the first name, adds a “dot”, then adds the last name with an “@” sign and the company domain name. If we had an employee named “Fred Smith” who worked at “widget.com”, we would need to assign the email address “f.smith@widget.com” to the user.

Imagine a list like the following:

Convert01

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Understanding Task Dependency Types in Microsoft Project

Dependency Types in Microsoft Project

When creating schedules in Microsoft Project the first thing that a Project Manager would typically do is to input the tasks involved in a project. These tasks then need to be linked to show the relationship between them. These links create task dependencies.

There are 4 different types of task dependency:

  • Finish-to-Start (FS): The finish date of one task drives the start date of another.
  • Start-to-Start (SS): The start date of one task drives the start date of another.
  • Finish-to-Finish (FF): The finish date of one task drives the finish date of another.
  • Start-to-Finish (SF): The start date of one task drives the finish date of another.

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Excel Pivot Tables Filter by Values

If you’ve ever used Pivot Tables in Excel, you no doubt have discovered the wonders of filtering.  The ability to filter row or column items can be extremely helpful when you don’t wish to analyze all of the items in the driving data set.

filter_pivottable_values_1

But what do you do if you wish to filter by the Value-based items?  In other words, the numbers in the “connect the dots” area where row and column choices intersect.  These, on first glance, don’t appear to have sorting and filtering controls available.

filter_pivottable_values_2

Rest assured, they do exist; you just have to dig a bit to find them.

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Excel Lookup with Dynamic Input

VLOOKUP is great for returning information from a database, but one of the limitations is that the return information is static.

What if the user wishes to look for certain data one day but different data another day?  This would require either two different sets of VLOOKUP functions or the functions would need to be reprogrammed.

In the database below, the user would wish to return address information in one scenario, but return financial information in another scenario.

Suppose there are times when the user requires a mixture of the two; that would require a third set of VLOOKUP functions. This could become an ever evolving set of work.

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Automatically Refresh Excel Pivot Tables

Excel PivotTables are one of the greatest tools in the spreadsheet user’s toolkit.

However, there is one tiny bit of functionality that appears to be missing: the ability of pivot tables to automatically update when information in the source data changes.

Most user’s see this as a glaring lack of functionality. There is, however a very good reason why pivot tables do not automatically update.

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