Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with excel

Importing Excel spreadsheet data into to Word

lunchbox — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:05:22 -0800

How can I make readable Word tables out of a large Excel spreadsheet? Here's a question for the Excel/Word gurus.

I have created some data in Excel that I need to put into a Word document (.docx) in table form, preferably so that I can continue to edit the Excel spreadsheet and have the Word tables dynamically update. I tried using "Paste Special" to insert one of my worksheets as an Excel Object, but the spreadsheet is too wide to fit in my portrait-oriented Word document. What is the best way to make this data fit?

I have thought of changing some of the pages in my document to "landscape", so that all the table fields can fit. However, it seems I can only change the page orientation for the "rest of the document" to landscape, and I want to change only the middle of my document.

Also, inserting as an Excel Worksheet is quite unappealing aesthetically. The table looks grainy, and when I export to .mht, the object is converted to an image file, so that I cannot select the text.

Another, closely related question: in some situations, I want to make a bunch of tables out of one spreadsheet. In other words, let's say I have the following Excel spreadsheet:

Name | Age | Sex
----------------------
John | 12 | Male
Jane | 13 | Female

I want to convert this to two side-oriented tables of the following format:

Name | John
Age | 12
Sex | Male

Name | Jane
Age | 13
Sex | Female

Ideally, I would like to put these two tables in different places in my document, and have them automatically update when the spreadsheet changes. This seems very similar to the Mail Merge feature, except I want the output to be in my document, not to other formats.

Any ideas? Thanks!

My knowledge of Excel has not served me well...

InfinateJane — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:07:48 -0800

Within cell C2, If the content of a cell in $A$10:$A$900 is the same as the content in A2, I would like Excel to Average the contents of column H in the rows that match A2...does that even make sense? Because I have tried explaining this to Excel in as many ways as possible, and all it ever says back is "#value" or "0".

Any help would be REALLY appreciated!

Excel solver binary constraint help

mtstover — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:53:54 -0800

Why is Excel Solver not using the binary constraints I've set? I've created a table which calculates an answer based on a set of binary flags (0,1) --- basically a sumproduct type function. I'm trying to minimize the answer. But when I run solver (setting a binary constraint on those cells), it doesn't actually use binary numbers and instead is using a whole bunch of fractions.

The longest line in excel land

Umhlangan — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:37:57 -0800

I need help making sense of data from an adobe form that I want to export to excel. Adobe just laughs and excel simply shrugs. I have a simple adobe acrobat form that my field sales agents fill out every week giving the status of all their large contracts. The info is in a table and contains 9 items of info per contract (on one line). There are usually about 15 or twenty projects per form so 20 lines of information per form.
The problem comes when I receive the form and it gets imported to the dataset. I then would like to export to excel (as csv) and have my way with all this data but I can't - it gets exported to one incredibly long line. As I understand it , this is what adobe does and there isn't really a workaround.
So what are my options other than many tedious hours of cutting and pasting every week? Is there a way to manipulate the excel data or should I rather be using infopath and acess maybe? Please bear in mind I am very much an amateur with databases and such so please keep it to basics.
I'll watch this thread in case anyone wants any more information.

Decimal seconds, please.

dondiego87 — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:03:50 -0800

Microsoft Excel VBA question: Converting decimal degrees to degrees-minutes-seconds (DMS), with rounding customization. I'm pretty proficient with Excel but am a complete n00b when it comes to programming even Visual Basic. I needed to convert some decimal degrees into DMS format, and failing to find a function that did so, I went to Google and found this page. Surprisingly enough, both of those modules worked successfully, allowing me to access them through the Function menu. I was even able to figure out how to change the function name to something I find clearer.

My one gripe about the Decimal-to-DMS conversion is that it doesn't allow for any numbers after the decimal point in the Seconds part of the output. I wouldn't usually mind (I know how tiny a second is), but I'm using this for a mapping application where meters matter, and the rounding is throwing me off. Can the hive mind help me get decimal seconds?

Excel Address Labels?

ThomThomThomThom — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:43:19 -0800

Excel filter:: Making mailing labels out of an excel spreadsheet? So I'm looking for a quick way to print a batch of labels from an Excel Spreadsheet... The addresses are broken into columns, so the name is in column A, the street address is in column B, and the city and zip is in column B... Thoughts? I've looked at Word's (2003) "envelopes and labels" stuff, but the only thing that it offers there is to import from Outlook's Address Book.... Any help would be appreciated!

Data visualisationfor presentations

tseo — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:56:30 -0800

I am looking for some good data visualisation books, tutorials and maybe software In my work I need to present my mates with lots of statistics mostly very simple but still I always need it to be as flashier and as simpler looking as possible. I am using Excel which kind of helps but not much since I am not always sure how I want to present the info and how to do it with Excel. I've seen there are some good data visualisation apps there but are mostly for dealing with complex databases and stuff.
What I am really looking for is something to guide me, help me make better visions for my simple statistics with presentation purposes.

I see some very good examples here - .

Finding Duplicates in Excel

Classic Diner — Thu, 29 May 2008 06:25:14 -0800

I'm looking for an easy way to find (not remove) duplicate information in an excel database. Ideally I need to be able to easily cross reference the other records with identical information in a certain column. I'm sorry for going to MeFi so quickly, but you are so dog gone smart. I'm not bad at figuring out excel, and I have written a macro or two, I'm just having trouble getting started.

The database is around 5k records. The information contained in one column might have 25 duplicate records. I'd like to find and be able to cross reference the rows which have duplicates in this one column.

Please help me sort my vocabulary list in Excel!

Vorteks — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:34:08 -0800

Complicated Excel formula question involving text-search and Japanese characters. Can you help? I have two spreadsheets.

Spreadsheet A contains a list of Japanese vocabulary words I need to learn for the JLPT this year. Spreadsheet B contains a list of Japanese characters in one column along with the characters "Heisig number" (an ordinal number indicating where that character appears in the book "Remembering The Kanji" by James Heisig).

I want to add a column to Spreadsheet A that will contain the highest Heisig number among the characters that make up the vocabulary word. The purpose of this is to sort the words in Spreadsheet A so that I can memorize only the words that can be written using the Kanji I've learned so far.

Confused? Here's an example: Spreadsheet A, cell 57A contains the word "朝寝坊". Using Spreadsheet B to looking up the 3 characters in that word, I find the Heisig number for 朝 is 52, 寝 is 1150, and 坊 is 492. 1150 is the highest of those 3 numbers, so I'd like Spreadsheet A, cell 57B to read "1150". Is there a way to set up a formula to do this? I've never pushed Excel this far before.

Thank you in advance, Hive Mind!

Excel tips & tricks

Dec One — Tue, 27 May 2008 08:41:27 -0800

I signed up to give a 90-minute Powerpoint presentation on Microsoft Excel 2007. It's open-ended as to the specific content, and I am stuck. The target audience is a group that uses Excel almost every day, so I've resigned myself to the fact that most people will already be familiar with most of the course content. But I'm hoping to give a presentation that offers at least one new thing for each attendee. Here's the list of things I've come up with to cover:

Auto filter

Advanced filters

Conditional formatting

Text-to-columns

Absolute vs. relative cell references

White backgrounds, and other tips to make spreadsheets look pretty

Vlookup

An overview of macros

This doesn't seem like it is enough to fill 90 minutes. The audience doesn't work with numbers much, but rather uses Excel to document and present information, so financial and mathematical or statistical functions aren't going to be too useful. What else should I include? Also, how can I make this seem like a coherent course, and not just a list of tips and tricks?

Why is my excel VBA code execution randomly slowing down?

johnstein — Wed, 21 May 2008 12:07:05 -0800

Sometimes excel VBA code executes very slow. Sometimes it's really fast. I can't seem to pinpoint why. I'm familiar with application.screenupdating = false and turning off autocalculation.

This happens with a variety of my programs, but most notably with a certain one that simply iterates through an array (i,j) and prints each value (i,j) to a cell on the worksheet. Just your basic nested for loops with a .cells(i,j) = array(i,j) in the middle. (ok, so the real code is more complicated, but as I explain below, this isn't the only code that has the issue, and several coworkers who use different code experience the same thing. I'm not looking for coding help, rather, trying to see if this is a common problem that others experience, or if it's really just a local company phenomena)

Sometimes when I run it, it can whip through a 500x100 array in just a couple seconds, other times, it slugs through it taking almost 10 minutes.

This is always the same type of data, mind you, and there are never any formulas or cell formatting to worry about. Just a blank workbook with one worksheet that needs to be filled with the data from the array.

A few other coworkers notice similar things.
Sometimes restarting excel seems to clear things up. Sometimes restarting the computer helps. Oftentimes it doesn't and seems to clear up randomly on its own later.

Has anyone ever noticed similar issues?

My guess is that perhaps there's a memory lag/leak/etc or something that is degrading performance, but I would assume restarting the app or computer would fix that. We usually attribute it to 'the server being slow' but we notice similar issues even when files are local. It's just really frustrating to be testing a bit of code that is blazingly fast the first few times you test it, then suddenly it screeches to practically a halt seemingly randomly, then later that day or week, it's all back to normal like nothing happened.

Thanks

Please sort my parrots

humuhumu — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:22:30 -0800

Item: one Excel spreadsheet. Contains: fifty rows. Column A - parrot name. Column B - parrot selling price. Column C - parrot age when sold. Without sorting the rows, how can I find the average age when sold of the most expensive ten parrots? I know I need an array here but just can't work out how to get my correct parrot average.

How can I embed an audio player into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet?

Emanuel — Tue, 20 May 2008 11:55:41 -0800

I have an Excel spreadsheet that contains a list of songs, and I want the viewer of the spreadsheet to be able to conveniently listen to sample clips of these songs. The 30 second sample clips are stored in MP3 format on a publicly accessable web server. Ideally, I would like each song to have a little "play" button next to it, which when clicked will stream the clip. And I'd like it to work on Windows and Mac OS, in Excel 2000 and up. I'd prefer that no extra window appear when streaming the clip, but a small, unobtrusive window that pops up quickly would be acceptable.

At the moment, the spreadsheet simply has a hyperlink to the MP3 for each song. This is inconvenient because, when clicked, the spreadsheet gets minimized and the user's web browser is loaded to play the clip. This makes for an annoying process if the user wants to listen to a bunch of the clips. If this could be done without minimizing Excel, that would be acceptable. Even better if the browser window that appears could be small and unobtrusive.

I've also tried embedding a Flash player into the spreadsheet. It works on Windows, but does not seem to work on Mac OS (I haven't looked deeply into this yet because I don't have direct access to a Mac). In addition, I can't seem to set the FlashVars property for the flash player in Excel, which means I can't specify the MP3 to play.

So, to summarize, here's what I'd like help with:

- Is the ideal solution possible, and how might I go about implementing it?
- If the ideal isn't possible, can I supress Excel's behaviour of minimizing when the user clicks on a web hyperlink? And is there a way to specify the size of the browser window that pops up?
- And finally, any hints on getting an embedded Flash player to work on Mac OS, and also how to set the FlashVars property in Excel?

Thankee!

Excel Sums with Multiple Criteria

Frank Grimes — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:18:41 -0800

Help me recreate these charts in Excel I am trying to recreate these charts in Excel. I have all of the data, but I want to manipulate it and create similar charts.

I cannot come up with the appropriate SUMIF or DSUM formulas that allow me to do this. Basically, I need a formula that says:
1) Pick a type of ship
2) Was the ship in service in the year in question?
3) Sum the gross tonnage of all ships that meet these criteria.

The hang up is the requirement of absolute references in the SUMIF and DSUM formulas (i.e. "Year=1990). I need a formula that I can drag across multiple years.

Can't calculate paired T-value in Visual Basic

JeNeSaisQuoi — Fri, 16 May 2008 02:53:16 -0800

Visual Basic and Excel: How do I replicate the results of excel’s internal function for paired dual tailed t-test in Visual Basic. I tried and failed, where did I go wrong? I’m admittedly a novice at Visual basic, but I succeeded in reproducing the t-test for Two-sample equal variance (homoscedastic) in Visual Basic. TTEST(array1,array2,2,2). I’m at a loss why I can’t be able to do the same for the paired t-test.

One possible explanation could be that I’m not using the same formula as excel does, but the formula that excel uses for the TTEST(array1,array2,2,1) is nowhere to be found. I used the formula in my statistics book that agreed with the one called Dependent t-test from the Wikipedia page for student’s T-test .
Is that the one excel uses for its TTEST(array1,array2,2,1) function?

Where else could I have gone wrong?

This is the code I made (again, I’m a novice, be gentle):

'The input consist of the area the data is located in, the columns containing the data we will use and the number of rows the area consist of
Function t_test1(area, column1, column2, NoOfRows)

Dim i, X_SubD, X_SubD2, Sample_stdev, T_TestValue

'Will eventually become the average difference
X_SubD = 0

'Will eventually become the sum of squared difference
X_SubD2 = 0
Sample_stdev = 0

For i = 1 To NoOfRows

X_SubD = X_SubD + (area(i, column1) - area(i, column2))

X_SubD2 = X_SubD2 + (area(i, column1) - area(i, column2)) ^ 2

Next i

'Calculate the average
X_SubD = X_SubD / NoOfRows

'Calculate the sample standard deviation
Sample_stdev = ((X_SubD2 - NoOfRows * X_SubD ^ 2) / (NoOfRows - 1)) ^ 0.5

'Calculate T-value
T_TestValue = X_SubD / (Sample_stdev / (NoOfRows ^ 0.5))

'Look up the significance and return the value
If T_TestValue < 0 Then
t_test1 = Application.WorksheetFunction.TDist(-T_TestValue, 2 * NoOfRows - 1, 2)
Else
t_test1 = Application.WorksheetFunction.TDist(T_TestValue, 2 * NoOfRows - 1, 2)
End If

End Function

I never Excelled in Excel

B(oYo)BIES — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:32:41 -0800

I have no clue what I am doing in Excel, so this is going to be a bit hard to explain, but hopefully somebody can help me here. I want to give Excel some text, and have it output a string. Let me explain. In A1 I type in something like

-^”some text”

In B1 I would like to see

-%5E%22some+text%22+

- stays - | ^ is changed to %5E | “ is changed to %22 | (space) is changed to +

I would continue in the same fashion down column A. The next thing I would like to do is take C1 (which is www.someaddress.com/q=) and add all the B column and then C2 (which is &something) and put the results in C3.

So C1+B1+B2+B3+B4…+C2
My output should be something like www.someaddress.com/q=-%5E%22some+text%22+-%5E%22some+other+text%22+&something

So, can anybody explain how to do this to an Excel dummy? 2007, if it matters.

Excel-Filter - How do I randomly reorder an array?

qldaddy — Tue, 13 May 2008 11:24:39 -0800

Someone asked me if I could use Excel to take a table of information and put it into a new table randomly. Without thinking about it too hard I said "Yeah, I bet I could do that." Turns out I spoke too soon. Assume a 10 X 10 array, filled with data (for my test runs, I've been using the cell addresses as the data, so A1 has "A1" in it, B2 has "B2", etc.) The task is to populate a new 10 X 10 array with the same data, but in random order.

I'm not having any trouble with the randomness part, I've got a couple of solutions working for generating random cell references. I am having trouble making sure that every reference is generated at least once and only once. Thinking about it another way, I want to generate the numbers 1-100 in random order without any number repeating.

I have come up with a really cludgy solution where I generate enough random numbers to make sure that every number comes up at least once and then filter that list to remove repeats. (thanks to this thread)

But, I was hoping for something a little more elegant that that. I'd also like it to work automatically and I haven't been able to create a Macro that will automate that filtering operation. Oh, and I also don't know how many data elements will be in the table that needs to be randomized, and, while stats was a long time ago, I bet I'd need a lot of random numbers to be sure of generating every number from 1-1000, for example.

So, any ideas?

How to tally votes in Excel?

jmitchell — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:28:19 -0800

How to tally votes in Excel? There is an Excel spreadsheet with many categories, with many votes per category. How do I get Excel to tally up the individual votes in a singe category? Each category is column, with the various votes per category listed as rows.

Switching axis in Excel 2003

Rustbeard — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:29:54 -0800

I'm using Microsoft Excel 2003 at work and I need to make a chart where the category (x) axis is the y axis; is there any way of doing this? I've been trying to figure out a way to make this work this morning and can't seem to get it to work. I have tried puting the actual values in the category section and the category in the values section but it does not work out that way. Or is there even just a way i can turn the chart around?
I'm using a line chart by the way.
This is for a science paper and I need to show percent %organic matter (thats the values) through depth (category) so it would be nice to have depth on the y axis going down and then the values plotted showing how it progress further down. This makes it a lot easier to understand then what I have currently which is displayed left to right.

How to make spreadsheet dynamically sortable web table?

Malad — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:01:35 -0800

I want to take an Excel spreadsheet and just make it a dynamically sortable table I can put in a webpage or blog. I want people to be able to click a column, and have the table be sorted by that column. Best solutions? Also, if the table included locations, is it possible to make them selectable, and have the selected locations display on Google maps? Thanks.

Show me how Excel can sort numbers and text in the order I want

Milkman Dan — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:26:26 -0800

Any Excel gurus in the room? I have an Excel spreadsheet with over 800 rows of data. Each row begins with a number (like 0001), and some have letters after the numbers (like 0001a). The Sort function doesn’t sort the way I’d like it to. Each row begins with a number, which is sequenced as follows...
0001
0001a
0001b
0002
0003a
0004

...you get the idea. Not every number gets a letter, but some do. The spreadsheet relies on continuous use of AutoFilters and sorting options to retrieve the data I need. However, “Sort Ascending” always changes the order of these numbers into an undesirable result. It sorts numbers first, and then numbers-with-letters, as follows:

0001
0002
0004
0001a
0001b
0003a

That’s bad. It’s cumbersome to find and sort the data. I can’t seem to make this work the way I want it to. I’ve tried using “Format Cells” to specify the cells are text, not numbers. I’ve also read through this support document from Microsoft, and tried the solutions there, but the same thing continues to happen. Am I doing something wrong?

If anybody has had experience resolving this problem before, I’d love to hear about your method and solution!

Link from excel cell to a specific PDF page?

bepe — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:03:03 -0800

Is there a way to create a link in an Excel spreadsheet to a specific page or destination in an external PDF file? I've read some tutorials that show how to do this in html documents but can't seem to figure out if it's possible in Excel. I'm using MS Excel 2000 and Adobe Acrobat 8.1.2 Professional. Thanks!

Excel 2007 - Duplicate Data Removal Issue

Sandor Clegane — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:26:14 -0800

Excel 2007 - Is there a way to remove ONLY a duplicate row leaving the first unique entry? I have a list of sweepstakes entries that need to be pared down to only unique entries. When I attempt to remove duplicate data it usually removes both the duplicates AND the first entry. I need to find a simple way (without formulas, if possible) to separate the duplicates from the unique entries.

The data columns are as follows: Entry Date, First Name, Last Name, Email, Birthdate, Address, City, State, Zip, Sex, Phone Number, Opt In 1, Opt In 2.

I need to remove all duplicate email addresses from the list. There are a few issues with the way I currently do things. If I just highlight the email column and remove duplicate data it shifts all the unique addresses up so now the data is out of alignment. If I select the entire spreadsheet and remove duplicates it doesn't come up with the same number of duplicate entries as I get with just the email column. Finally, if I apply conditional formatting to the duplicate entries it highlights all versions of the same email address. Thus, I would be removing all entires for that person. I need to allow them one and remove the rest.

I realize there are ways to do this with formulas but I have to do this often and applying a formula to tens of thousands of rows is very, very cumbersome.

Oh Hive Mind, please help me!

Automatic Revision Planner

edbyford — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 06:44:46 -0800

I need a solution which will help me work out my revision plan automatically (Possible Excel filter?) Please help! Hello everyone

I'm revising for university exams at the moment. The way I do this is to go through either the textbook or my notes, making summaries as I go.

At school I used to set myself to do an hour of this, an hour of that etc. but I found that didn't work as I rushed things somewhat. So I've set out a plan which requires me to do a certain number of pages for each exam every day.

The trouble with this is, I still miss things out! I'll skip a day because of whatever, or I won't manage to get one set of pages for a certain exam done, or (as I've had to do) I realise that there is some additional book it would be useful to look at, so I double the amount of pages I'm doing in order to fit the second book in afterwards.

What I would love to do would be to have a program which I can type in the number of pages I have to do, the date I have to have revised them by, and whether I'm planning to take a break on certain days (or over the weekend), and also be able to tell it if I missed certain day, or didn't finish all the pages for one day, and have it tell me what I need to do over the remaining time available to catch up.

I use Windows (so no cross-platform solutions needed, though that would be cool), and I'm guessing maybe an Excel spreadsheet would work best for this, but I would prefer a web-based solution (although I could just upload it to Google Docs).

I have no idea how to implement this, but it would be such a cool idea for students and GTDers the world over.

Thanks in advance for your help!

help me make my budget work for me!

stormygrey — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:02:12 -0800

Excel Filter: I can't figure out how to make Excel show my budget the way I need it to. I need a very basic spreadsheet, or so you would think, but apparently I don't want to see what most people see.

Alot of our bills are completely fixed so all the "actual vs. difference" templates are not what I want. What I need is one column where all the incoming and outgoing money is listed, almost like a projected bank statement, and a corresponding running total on the other side.

Because of the way our withholdings and whatnot are scheduled and the fact that he gets paid every other Friday and I am paid on the 1st and the 15th, it gets confusing because our money is pretty freaking tight. I really feel like I at least need to know where we should stand every week, but all the templates are set up as monthly.

I know this should be simple, but I have no idea about how to make this spreadsheet. If you can point me at a template that does what I want or just some formulas and suggestions on how to set it up, that would be great.