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Conditional Formula Selection in Excel

Bugbread — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:21:42 -0800

How can I create an Excel worksheet which uses something like VLOOKUP (or anything which works in a similarish way) not to pull values, but formulas? So, here's the situation: I'm trying to make a single billing Excel sheet where I can keep track of invoicing multiple clients. However, due to peculiarities of my industry (translation), the formula used for billing each client is different. Some round up to the nearest 100 words, some round normally to the nearest 100 (49 rounds to 0, 51 rounds to 100), some are billed X per 100 words, some are paid Y per 100 words.

I can make any one of those formulas fine, independently, but I'd like to have all clients on the same page, and use some sort of formula where I'd pick the clients name, enter the number of words in the translation, and Excel would look up in a table or something to determine that, for example, the formula for Company A is ROUNDUP(A2/100,0)*100*B2 but the formula for Company B is ROUND(A2/100,0)*100*B17 or the like.

Is there any way to do this without nesting IF clauses (which would become troublesome the more clients I got)?

Its like choose your own adventure, but the adventure is work and the outcome is always a workorder

DetonatedManiac — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:13:12 -0800

TechFilter: I need a way to do information gathering questions that adjust based on previously asked questions. Must be easy to put on a website or transmit to customers and then receive their responses. We are swamped in these requests for custom data integration of our product to our customers' databases; and mired when integrations that should take hours stretch on for weeks due to mis-communication.

We need something that is part worksheet, part check list, and part request form/work order for the customer to fill out. Something that will give them context and information about what we do, give us all the needed information about their systems, force them to answer questions about exactly what they want and keep a copy of what they give us so later we can explain why what we did is what they asked for. It would also be cool (not essential) if it could "tally" the answers. IE "yes we can automate", or "no we can't" or "someone will get back to you".

The problem is ideally we want to keep it simple, but still gather all the needed information and easy to transmit to (sometimes technologically limited) customers.

I am thinking a dynamic questionnaire that will have conditional parts. IE, if you answer Question 1 with YES, then questions 4, 5, and 6 appear, but if you answer with NO, then question 3 appears and question 10 disappears, and if you answer with "I don't know" question 2 appears with an open ended question and a text box, etc.

at the end we need a readout of what they answered so that we have a record of what they want.

I already know a few ways to do this that are merely adequate, but I'd like to hear a broader view of options. That said, don't tell me for the 6th time it can be done in excel unless you can provide me with a really good example of a finished product that is professional looking and drop dead easy to use.

THAT said, I ALSO need this in 2 weeks (or at least a working prototype sans content).

Thanks Hive Mind!

Automatically updating multiple Excel worksheets from one "master" worksheet?

entropicamericana — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:54:41 -0800

How to automatically breakout Excel worksheets based off one "master' worksheet? I inherited an Excel spreadsheet that is being used to to track individual orders. It is built so each order has its own row and the columns reflect various information (i.e. state)

My boss wants data entry done on the "master" worksheet. Then he wants the other sheets to automatically update given certain criteria. (For example, all orders placed in California.)

Let's say the state column is Column A and the values are simple two letter postal codes.

How would I write a function that would say if A2 is CA, then paste 2 here and if A2 is not CA, go to row 3 and check for CA?

How to get around Excel macro warning.

emjay — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:18:34 -0800

How to bypass Excel macro warning or alternative to macro. Working in Excel and need to "highlight" when others replace a formula with a manually entered value.

For different reasons, this complicated, multi-sheet, multi-user spreadsheet cannot be locked or protected as 2 dozen individuals make periodic changes to it and since they often enter information incorrectly, we want some formatting to make the errors stand out when they enter it, or for the oblivious, make it easier for the reviewer to catch the problems.

I do not want alternatives to Excel (Open Office, Google, etc) nor do I want recommendations to use something besides a spreadsheet.

What I need is an easily implemented patch/fix to disable the macro warning (A Digital signature is not an option) or an alternative, non-macro, way to implement the same setup below.

NAME is defined as "FormulaCheck"
which Refers to "=GET.CELL(48,INDIRECT("rc",0))"

The affected cells are formatted with a standard RED Fill Color
They are then Conditionally formatted with Formula is "FormulaCheck" with the conditional format to be a fill color of pale blue with no other conditions (FormulaCheck is a True/False)

This allows for the formula to display the normal visual look and formatting when all is well and if someone enters data manually that overwrites a formula it will stand out in RED. The intent is so that the user, or the reviewer will easily be able to locate the screw-ups.

The problem with this older macro language is that it also requires the user to click on "enable" or "yes" or some variation to allow macros to run whenever they open the document. This is done by the many individuals a few times a day.

My google-fu has failed me and I need some alternative to disable the macros or to try it in VBA (which I'm really not familiar with.)

Bonus points if it is easy to implement so that I can document the use for other spreadsheets the users may want to try this on.

Using conditional formulas to sum up data in Microsoft Excel

korres — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:34:04 -0800

Can I use Excel to loop through lists of names and sum up numbers for each name, without having to define the cell ranges that correspond to each name? (This is Excel 2003.)

I have an Excel workbook with many worksheets inside. Each worksheet corresponds to an area of responsibility. Each row has a person's name on it, but each person can have many rows. So when sorted by name, each worksheet looks like this:

Doe, John x x x 1.00 x
Doe, John x x x 4.00 x
Smith, Jane x x x 8.00 x
Smith, Jane x x x 6.00 x

Where each x represents a column of data I don't care much about. There are no blank lines between the names; there's just a header row at the top of the spreadsheet, then solid data until the end of the name list.

I also have a summary worksheet with one row for each worksheet. The summary worksheet uses =SUM(WorksheetName!StartingCell:EndingCell) to add up the numbers column.

What I really want to do is create another summary worksheet that would have a row for each worksheet + person combination that sums that person's total numbers on that worksheet. So it would look like:

Worksheet Name
Doe, John 5.00
Smith, Jane 14.00

Repeated for each worksheet and the people who have numbers on that worksheet.

I want a formula that will:
1. Look at the each cell in the first column of a given worksheet.
2. For each cell that contains a name, skip over four columns and add the number in that cell to a running total.
3. Continue until it hits a different name, then dump the total in a cell on my "person summary" worksheet.
3. Repeat that process for the next name in the worksheet, until it comes to the first blank cell in the first column.

Can Excel handle this type of conditional formula? I can't find an example that seems analogous to what I want -- or if I have, I haven't recognized it.

How can I conditionally format an entire row in Excel based upon the data in one of the columns in that row?

ChasFile — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:33:34 -0800

How can I conditionally format an entire row in Excel 2007 based upon the contents of a particular column in that row? Say row 1 column J, row 4 column J, and row 19 column J all contain "Alice." I'd like rows 1, 4, and 19 all to appear with a red background. Say row 2 column J, row 44 column J, and row 45 column J all contain "Bob." I'd like for rows 2, 44, and 45 all to appear with a blue background. And so forth.

Basically, what I'm asking is how to make a relative column reference in a formula. I remember doing precisely this using VBScript for Excel years ago, but for the life of me can't locate that old code. Anyway, something along the lines of the following psuedo-code entered into the Conditional Formatting dialog box:

Apply "Format 1" according to the following formula [assuming (y,x) refers to (column y, row x)]:

=IF((J,ROW())="Alice")

It might also be nice to do this with a named range, so that if I apply the name "First_Name" to the entirety of row J, the formula is then a bit clearer:

=IF((First_Name,ROW())="Alice")

Total n00b0 question, I'm sure, but I don't spend much time in Excel, and am would very much appreciate the help. Thanks!

If I were recently laid off, I would have a lot of time on my hands.

jason's_planet — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:10:05 -0800

GrammarFilter: Is the sentence “If I were ______, I would have done _____” grammatically incorrect? If so, why? This is a grammar question.

Is a sentence that begins with “If I/you/she were” and ends with “I would have done __________” grammatically incorrect? I’ve assumed that a sentence that begins with the (subjunctive?) “If I were” has to be paired with a (conditional?) phrase such as “this would happen” and that a sentence which ends with a phrase like “would have” has to be paired with a phrase like “If I had been.” Under that scheme, these sentences should read like this:

"If I were ______, I would do (this, that and the other thing)."

"If I had been ______, I would have done (this, that and the other thing)."

Is this assumption correct? While I’m on the topic, what verb tenses am I using in the latter example (“would have” and “If I had been”) and how can I explain this rule to people who are not grammar geeks?

Many thanks in advance. Happy Holidays!

I would like to be more polite

ORthey — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 09:01:41 -0800

In (some) languages, why is the conditional so frequently related to politeness? In the languages I've studied to some degree (English, Spanish, French, Russian), the most common way to be polite is to use the conditional. "I would like," "quisiera," "j'aimerais," "Ya buy khotyel," etc. I'm wondering if anyone knows why this is? it's not, at least for me, intuitive. Are there other languages that do it drastically differently?