computer/programming/excel wizards! help an idiot!

I sent her a file with a vlookup programmed into it, and instructions on how it works so that she can hopefully modify the range if needed.. I did think about a macro but I figured everyone should know how to do a sweet vlookup :)

there has been a ticker tape parade, ffm presented with keys to the city, not a dry eye in the place

It's true! I felt like a modern day Mother Teresa.

Oh man I love a good vlookup

i am a fan now

Just remember to never ever merge cells. They will just screw everything up. AVOID AT ALL COSTS

yessir

Xp - highlight, right click format, alignment, center across selection

boom goes the dynamite

Hmm, don't merge cells ever, or don't merge cells when you use vlookup? I merge cells sometimes to get a nice clean subcategorised table but it's true that things often go mysteriously screwy with merged cells around

I like a good vlookup as long as I remember to set the mysterious final parameter to FALSE, which tells it "hi, my lookup table might not necessarily be sorted, and also if a value isn't in the table then tell me and don't just go making some shit up based on the imaginary ordering you think the lookup table's in but it isn't"

not explaining that very well and hell I was bored so I messed around with Google docs and: fun with vlookup
(to remind myself as much as anything tbh)

I don't like merged cells with or without vlookups. I'd use in moderation though when my boss absolutely demanded a certain visual style.

god I miss all this stuff

I used to make a lot of reports that people typed into and merged cells were very nice there. But they can be a nuisance if copying and pasting or sorting or filtering.

lol apc I think I told VG "put the last bit as false, I don't know why, just do it" ;) will check our yr google doc when not on my phone!

PS I think it's nice that Google docs spreadsheets now do p. much everything I ever do in Excel, including having the same worksheet formula functions/syntax

Microsoft might not think this is nice, of course, but then given that dates are weird in Excel for the sole reason that they were weird in Lotus 1-2-3, well...

(haven't used their "scripts" so no idea how they compare to macros; haven't used their charts either but charts are p. horrible in Excel if you ask me, which you did not)

Can't do text to columns in Google, my biggest complaint.

As an alternative to the vlookups, there's a nifty macro to do the unpivot-ing thing here:

http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/tag/unpivot/

The second one (UnPivot_snb) looks like the way to go. Kind of lame that Excel doesn't have unpivot built in, IMO.

Like converting data laid out in a PivotTable to a regular range? Can't you just copy and paste/paste values?

Probably a dumb conditional formatting question, but hey, this the idiot's thread!

My sheet is organized with clients as the header, and each row is a date, and the cells contain percentages. At the bottom of each column is a minimum %, and I want to highlight cells in a column that are less than that column's min %. Is there a way to do that with a single rule, because it seems I have to create a rule for each column to do that?

Select one of the cells you want to format, go to conditional formatting and choose Use a formula to determine.. then use the formula =OR(cell that you want to format < minimum value cell), make sure you use $ to fix that last cell. Use the format painter to apply the conditional formatting to the other cells.

That $ lock could get tricky if you keep adding rows to this sheet or copy format to a new column, but what Nate described is easiest method of doing this.

I don't understand why but it works! Thanks,

I'm trying to create a timeline.

What I've got is a spreadsheet of five states and their unemployment rates for the past 12 months.

Currently, the spreadsheet is organized as:

STATE1 | JANUARY | RATE
STATE2 | JANUARY | RATE
STATE3 | JANUARY | RATE
STATE4 | JANUARY | RATE
STATE5 | JANUARY | RATE
STATE1 | FEBRUARY | RATE
STATE2 | FEBRUARY | RATE
STATE3 | FEBRUARY | RATE
STATE4 | FEBRUARY | RATE
STATE5 | FEBRUARY | RATE
etc.

What I would like it to look like is

____ ____ | JANUARY | FEBRUARY | MARCH
STATE1 | __RATE___ | __RATE___ | _____RATE
STATE2 | __RATE___ | __RATE___ | _____RATE
STATE3 | __RATE___ | __RATE___ | _____RATE
STATE4 | __RATE___ | __RATE___ | _____RATE
STATE5 | __RATE___ | __RATE___ | _____RATE

How could I do this?

Do you want it to be just a regular series of data? If you're ok with a PivotTable, I think that would give you exactly what you need, though they can be a bit of a pain to set up. But if you did that, you could just copy and paste the data into a regular sheet

Pivot table. Add a row above each header state, month, rate. Then pivot. Add state to row, month to column, and sum the rate.

Oh dear Lord, that did it. Thank you both.

Does anyone understand the fourth/sorted?/last argument for vlookup? I don't think I've ever encountered a situation where setting it to true led to correct results.

tbh I mainly just forget to set it to False by accident and then get stupid results but this is my understanding:

if you set it to True (which is sadly the default) it only works correctly on a sorted list, and if the value doesn't appear in the list it returns the info for the "closest" match (the highest value < or == the value you typed in iirc, so if you search for 99 and it has rows with 70 and 100 but not 99 it'll give you the data for 70 instead of 100)

this dates back to when computers were just not powerful enough to search through an unsorted list in a sensible amount of time, so I guess it used to be the only option and now it's the default for reasons of backward compatibility

it runs faster in this mode but for a non-sorted list the results are completely wacky, and even with a sorted list most of the time I'd rather know that the value I'm looking for isn't there, because I mainly use it as a crude database: what is the data for the exact record with this ID?

but I guess this use would have worked for something like a ready reckoner, where you want to look up (say) which city you could get to with 15 gallons of gas, and it looks at the sorted distance/city table and says "well, San Diego is 14 gallons away, how about that for a day trip"

(uhh I'm bad at examples, sorry. there must be a much more convincing real world example. I have actually had a couple of occasions where it was a workable option but I can't remember what they were)

use index match not vlookup

(imperative)

but yea spacecadet has got it iirc. in index match the last argument is 0 for exact, 1 for nearest lowest, -1 nearest at most as large, +1 nearest at least as large

yeah index match is certainly more efficient once you start to go beyond a couple hundred rows

A good reason for INDEX MATCH over VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP is you can search right->left or bottom->top

also you can look up arrays (although this gets slow fast)

ugh fuck arrays unless you absolutely positively need them

Learnt double vlookup, never looked back.

http://dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2015/04/23/how-much-faster-is-the-double-vlookup-trick/

would love to encourage all Excel users advanced enough to be doing lookups to dabble in some scripting, I've been suggesting https://automatetheboringstuff.com to people

i've googled my problem but it hasn't helped, hope maybe someone here can help -
for the last few days when i try to open spotify, in both chrome and IE, i get a error message. not on my 'puter r/n so i'm being unintentionally vague. but it's some kind of message mentioning problem with ssl (whatever that means). i cleared ssl, and deleted cache, as i saw that recommended but that didn't change matters. . . ?

xp- i've automated most of the tedium out of my job with R :-)

I hesitate to even ask. Apparently, I have an impossible task, and the messageboards peppered with spreadsheet quarterbacks aren't helping.

I have, like, 5000 Web page titles in one column and the number of pageviews for each in another. I am looking for the average number of pageviews culminated from the list.

But I can't just SUM it up and divide it by 5000 because some of the page titles are duplicates or at least paternal twins of others. For example "The Circus is Coming to Town", "UPDATE: The Circus is Coming to Town", and "The Cicus is Coming to Town" all have different number of pageviews, but they all really only belong to one story (that had its title changed a few times.)

What I've been doing is slowly going down the list sorted alphabetically (I've F+R'ed the UPDATES: with nothing, but the stories are still there.) When I come to a bunch, I highlight the two or four cells with the pageviews in Column B, click on SUM, and keep moving.

After I've gone through 500 or so, I scroll all the way down to the end of the rows to where the sums have been appearing. Now I've got 500 cells in Column B with formulas in them that read things like "=SUM(B235:B237)". So that I know which article each cell corresponds to, I input =A237 or whatever the last three numbers were from Column B. That way, the title of the last story will appear there.

My plan after this will be to take this section of =Axxx | =SUM(Byyy:Bxxx, paste it into a new document and get rid of the formulas. Then adding that back to the original lineup. I will have an extra article now with each bunch, but then I can delete the others (whichever ones don't have the highest number), and THEN get my average.

There MUST be a different way to do this though. And as it is now, it is a PAIN IN THE ASS to just create the A column since I have to manually type out the information on each one.

If this thread doesn't get updated again for another two-and-a-half years, I'll understand.

I’ll just do that for you for $100

Ha.

If there's no way out of this, I'd also be happy to hear some appropriate playlist recommendations.

i'm trash at excel but my first thought would be to add a new column and use a formula to search keywords from column A, trying to tag rows that you can sum up later. i'm curious about how many rows out of the 5000 are realistically dupes.

A lot.

Much of it has to do with the header that appears at the top of the browser, which is different depending upon whether someone hits the site from an enewsletter, from Google, or from an internal page.

There aren't that many headlines that get changed, but enough to keep me off-balance.

yeah, i would be trying to pull keywords from the headlines and dumping them into a 3rd column

I dunno if this is of help, but it might ease the process a little bit
Assuming a file ala

col A | col b
-------------
LOL   | 50
LOL!  | 100
ROFL  | 50

If "LOL" and "LOL!" are the same page, then average pageviews should be 100.
What you could do is delete the value in col A for one of the duplicates, and find unique pages with COUNTA ( cf https://support.office.com/en-us/article/counta-function-7dc98875-d5c1-46f1-9a82-53f3219e2509 )

-------------

LOL   | 50
      | 100
ROFL  | 50

Then you can write something like

total page views = sum(B1:B3)
unique pages = COUNTA(A1:A3)
Average = total / unique

Of course, this still means you have to go through the whole document and hit delete on any field that contains what you believe to be a duplicated page.
But at least you wouldn't have to write individual SUMs for various subsets etc.

Holy cats, Øystein, I think that's going to do the trick.

I had spent three days doing it the other way and had gotten midway through the C's. In about two hours, I'm between the M's and the N's. using your method.

From A2 to A2804, I had 1,804 actual (unique) stories.

Thank you so much for the help.

Cool, I'm happy to hear it

ANNOUNCE XLOOKUP

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Excel-Blog/Announcing-XLOOKUP/ba-p/811376

omg

index/match shurely

i guess i am still definitely a nerd because i actually am excited by this news