Sankey Diagram in Power BI

Sankey Diagrams show how data flows from one entity to another. You'd think that it would be difficult to create but with Power BI and the Visuals marketplace from Microsoft, you can create a simple Sankey chart to have provide some interactivity or just copy/paste to a presentation or infographic.

Google Sheets - Lookup the Last Matching Value

If you've worked with most lookup functions (like VLOOKUP, LOOKUP, etc.) it will bring back the first matching value in the range you selected. However there may be times when you want to see the last matching value from your lookups. In this video it will go through two examples of how to get the last matching value from a lookup with Google Sheets. One will be using the LOOKUP function (along with other functions) and the other will be a crazy combination of INDEX, IF, ARRAYFORMULA, ROW AND LARGE.

Unpivot Multiple Columns | Added Columns Changes

To unpivot a report or table used to be a difficult process, but it's become a much easier process with Power Query feature in Excel. Still there are things to consider when using the unpivot feature because when column changes with adds it DOES depend on how the unpivot is done and where the column is added.

Google Sheets - Perform a Lookup [3 Examples]

In most spreadsheet applications there are multiple ways to do the same thing. Google sheets is not exception as it provides you many ways to accomplish similar tasks. A common task in most spreadsheets is looking up values or records based on set criteria. There are a few functions we can use in Google Sheets to do a lookup and this video will cover three functions that can accomplish lookups: VLOOKUP, the INDEX / MATCH combination and FILTER (though the FILTER function is not technically a lookup function it can still be used to lookup records).

Perform a Lookup with the FILTER Function

One of the new Dynamic Array functions in Microsoft or Office 365 is the FILTER function and this can let you perform a lookup on a table of data. Generally when we think of filtering data it's already in a table and we're using the drop downs to filter based on some criteria. With the newer FILTER function, we can separate the source table and the output table in different parts of the worksheet tab or in separate worksheet tabs. This can even be used in scenarios where we'd want to make a dashboard to separate this. This video will cover some different examples of how FILTER can be used. Common usage (0:56) Multiple criteria (5:20) Find duplicate data (9:55) Output few adjacent columns (11:47) Output few non-adjacent columns (12:35)

Google Sheets - Create a Static Timestamp

If you're doing some project management and don't have a large budget, you can use Google Sheets as a poor man's project management tool. One concept in most project management timelines is the concept of estimated dates and actual dates. Usually you'd input the dates manually for these dates, but it would be nice to have the actual date entered "auto-magically" based on the value changes of another cell (i.e., when a percent complete is entered). But you don't want the actual dates to change after the initial value is triggered in that cell; you want the time stamp that updates only if data is entered in some cell. This video covers a workaround using iterative calculations and sort of breaks a rule in spreadsheet design where you don't want circular references. In this case, we'll have to change the Google Sheet setting to allow for it. See the video to learn how to do this.

Append or Combine Tables | Same File | Many Worksheets

Excel can be used to to append tables in multiple different worksheet tabs in the same workbook file. But there may also be a value that you'd want to preserve in those worksheets to use for a new column value in the combined output. The tables are all structured the same and have the same column headings but the worksheet tabs have the generic name (i.e, Sheet1 or Sheet2). The common field in each worksheet can be used as a value that categorizes the tables. One worksheet will be California data and another worksheet would be New York data. If these were small data sets, then copy/paste and some column movements would suffice. However if these are large tables, you do this on a recurring basis or you had 10 or 20 worksheets in the file, it would be a chore. This is a great opportunity to use Power Query and this video will show how. This is a tip I learned from Gil Raviv's book. Get the book at https://amzn.to/2Zj9ADY