Intermediate/Advanced Excel Functionality

IRAP Professional Development Workshop Series

Zak Buschbach

Summer 2015

Links for Today

• Dataset for today:

• http://tinyurl.com/irapexceladvanced

• Shortcut guide:

• http://tinyurl.com/excelshortcutsirap

Locking Cell References with $

• When auto-filling formulas, you may want to “lock” cell references, rather than allowing the references to update dynamically • Relative vs. Absolute Cell References

• Relative: (A2)

• Absolute: ($A$2)

• Relative Column/Absolute Row: (A$2)

• Absolute Column/Relative Row: ($A2)

AutoSum

• Multiple columns can be AutoSummed/Averaged/etc.

• For example, use this to make a subtotals row

Nesting Formulas

• Nesting formulas is crucial to many of the most powerful things you can do in Excel

Defining Ranges

• A range is any set of two or cells

• While ranges can be referenced by the cells that they are composed of (A2:A101) (A:A) (A2:B101) etc, naming ranges allows for simpler formulas and less repetition

• Select the range you

want to define

• Give the range a

name by clicking the

“Name Box,” entering

a name, and hitting

Enter/Return

Defining Ranges

• Once a range is defined, you can reference the range by its name instead of the set of cells in any formula

• For example, in a VLOOKUP

OLD

NEW

Ranking Formulas

• =SMALL, =LARGE, =RANK • =SMALL – nth smallest element in a range (range, n)

• =LARGE – nth largest element in a range (range, n)

• =RANK – the rank of x in a range (number, range, ascending/descending)

ROUNDING

• Three ways to round • =ROUND – standard rounding

• =ROUNDUP – round up if partials should count as wholes

• =ROUNDDOWN – round down if partials should not be counted

• =ROUND…(cell, # of decimal places)

Workday Calculations

• =WORKDAYS – Start Date, Number of Workdays Until Deadline, Holiday Array • Gives deadline

• =NETWORKDAYS – Start Date, End Date, Holiday Array • Gives number of workdays

DOB to Age

• This lengthy formula will take dates of birth and output a text string of the age • Uses =NOW() which outputs the current date and time in Excel-readable

format

Practical DOB to Age Application

• Nest the DOB to Age calculation in an IF formula to return a live updating “of-age” text response

IF FORMULAS

IF Formulas

• =IF()

• =IFERROR ()

AVERAGE/IF/S

• AVERAGE and AVERAGEIF/AVERAGEIFS take the arithmetic mean • In this example, AVERAGEIFS is used to only take the mean of non-

zero amounts of money earned on campus

SUMIF

• SUMIF – adds cells that meet a criterion • Example: Add up the money made by those who made more than $100

• Compare to SUM – all money made on-campus

SUMIFS

Set multiple conditions for adding cells

Example:

Sum of all money made by Greek students

making over $100 on campus

COUNTIF

• COUNTIF • Counts the number cells in the range that meet the condition

COUNTIFS

COUNTIFS does multiple conditions for counting cells

For example: Count up the number of Greek Athletes in the dataset

TEXT FORMULAS

=LEN – Length of a text string

• =LEN() • Produces the length of the string in the indicated cell

Combine =LEN with =IF

• Not Nested – Uses a “helper column”

• Nested – no helper column necessary

Rule:

Name tags can’t be

longer than 15

characters

Is the name too

long?

A more complex nested IF and LEN formula that uses “&” and produces two different results

Rule:

Concatenate the first and last name, abbreviating the last name

only if the full name (including space) is over 12 characters

PROPER

• =PROPER() • Capitalizes the first letter of each word from the source cell

• Useful for when the formatting of your source database is all or partially lowercase

PROPER with CONCATENATE

TRIM and LEFT/RIGHT/MID

• =TRIM() • Removes extra spaces, leaving one between each word

• Particularly useful if there are extra spaces at the end of some of your strings, which can cause problems in matching data

• =Left/Right/Mid() • =LEFT(cell reference, number of leftmost characters to return)

• =RIGHT(cell reference, number of rightmost characters to return)

• =MID(cell reference, starting position, length of characters to return)

Index/Match – A more flexible VLOOKUP

• VLOOKUP is great but limited in only being able to lookup values in the left-most column of the source table • INDEX(MATCH()) overcomes this obstacle, but is more complex to employ

• Recall: VLOOKUP(thing to lookup, table to look in, column to return, sorted?)

• INDEX(column to return, MATCH(thing to lookup, where to look,0))

• Example: • First define Name & SAT columns as defined ranges of “names” and “sats”

• Goal: Find out the name of the person who got a 2090 SAT score (assume everyone got unique scores for this example – otherwise the first such person will always be returned by VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH

Array Functions

• Array formulas can accomplish a number of things • They are a way to eliminate “helper columns”

• CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER • When you enter an array function, you must enter this key

combination

Formula Checking with “Show Formulas”

Ctrl + ` ― Show Formulas

Slicers

Slicers allow you to filter multiple

PivotTables on a single variable, with

one click

Slicers Continued

Choose the

filter variable

and the

PivotTables to

connect to the

slicer

Slicers Continued

Three Pivots

with a

connected

Slicer – no filter

applied

Slicers Continued

All three

Pivots

recalculate

when a

slicer

option is

chosen

Go To > Special

• Ctrl + G

Applying Go To Special to Clean-up Data

• A common application of Go to Special • Take data from the web that is poorly formatted and turn it into a usable

Excel spreadsheet

• In this example, USNWR Top 50 Liberal Arts College data (link)

USNWR Example

• What it looks like when you paste it into Excel:

USNWR Example

• Paste Values and Clean-up Numbering Scheme

Tables and Charts

• In-text charts • Sparklines

• =REPT(“|”,x)

• Examples of good and bad charts