Excel Roundup 20151116

In this week’s roundup, create a rolling total, chart tricks, unmerge cells, clean data, and much more.

Excel Roundup http://blog.contextures.com/

1. Rolling Total

Instead of an overall running total for a list, you could create a rolling total – use a formula to show the sum of the previous 12 months in each row. Download the sample file to see how it works.

2. Fun With Charts

To make things easier for your, or the people who use your reports, Mike Alexander shows how to set up a check box to turn the chart labels on or off. The technique doesn’t use macros, and you can download his sample file to see how it works.

On his latest podcast, Chandoo talked about creating animated charts. To get some great ideas, listen to the podcast, and download the sample file.

3. Show the Achievement Gap

In a report to her superintendent, the Science Goddess had to show the achievement gap — the difference in achievement levels between populations of students. It took her a while to find the best way to represent the data in a chart, and you can see that the results were worth the effort.

4. Data Cleanup

Faced with a messy list of telephone numbers, Dave Bruns used nested SUBSTITUTE functions to strip out all the spaces, hyphens, periods, parentheses, and commas. Then, he formatted the results with the Telephone Number format, to create a clean and easy-to-read phone list.

There are more data cleanup techniques, along with other tips for data analysts, on the Investintech blog. One tip shows how to bring together data from several CSV files, using either Power Query, or Ron de Bruin’s free RDB Merge add-in.

5. Lookup in a Structured Table

On this Daily Dose of Excel blog, Dick Kusleika showed how to create a lookup formula that works with structured table references. He even made a video! Originally, he used VLOOKUP, but he has now switched to INDEX/MATCH instead, thanks to some tough love from the commenters. The Internet can be a rough place!

6. Excel Humour

Finally, for a bit of spreadsheet humour, you can see what people are saying about Excel, in my weekly collection of tweets. Here’s one of my favourite tweets from this week’s collection.

twitter20151113b

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Excel Roundup http://blog.contextures.com/

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