Monday, February 22, 2021

Use the Power Query Data Type Customization

In the Microsoft Office subscription or Microsoft 365 version of Excel there's data types that let you get a lot more information from just one value in a cell. There is a stock data type that lets you view the latest information of that public company like the stock price or shares outstanding; and that is just based on the name of the company in one cell. Now you can actually create you own custom data type courtesy of Power Query. Think of it as a small table or list that you can expand from just one cell in your worksheet. You can have any time of structured table of related information and it all gets encapsulations in one column of multiple row cells. See the video to learn how this can be done.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Create a Clickable Image Map in SharePoint


In SharePoint classic pages, you were able to have a clickable image map similar to an ordinary web page. However with SharePoint modern pages, Microsoft seemed to have taken that ability away. There is actually a workaround for this using another popular Microsoft product - PowerPoint. You can create the hotspots with multiple links for each part of an image, upload this using the file viewer web part and bam(!) you have a pseudo image map along with the ability to mouseover and see the link without writing html.

Monday, February 15, 2021

Calculate a Binomial Distribution Probability in Excel

A binomial distribution is basically a type of distribution that has only two possible outcomes: Success or Failure. An example would be toss of a typical coin...you either get a heads or tails. If you choose heads , that would be your success and tail would be the failure. Now if we wanted to calculated the probability of success based on X number of tosses, there is actually a formula to calculate that probability. Excel makes it really easy, but I'll show four different ways to get this answer.

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Use the LET Function in Excel

If you familiar with programming or VBA you'll love the LET function. It basically lets you define a name with a cell, assign it a value and perform calculations with that name. It might be overkill with basic functions, but when you've got more complicated formula that call on the same range or set data ranges, the LET functions makes it more efficient to execute and easier to read and troubleshoot. It's only available on Microsoft 365 version, so if you got that version check out this video to get an introduction to the LET function.

Monday, February 8, 2021

Create Interactive Power Query Report Start & End Date

Power Query can make interactive reports with a start date and end date with a simple function query. This is not as hard as it sounds even though it involves getting into the M code a bit. The nice thing about this method is that you can then hide the data source from a user and give some basic instruction on how to use this to generate a basic report. Though it covers date selection, this method can be applied to other type of user input like text selections.

Monday, February 1, 2021

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.

Friday, January 29, 2021

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.