Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with formulas

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)?

Need excel formula to calculate the number of days in a date range, if they end within that range

malcommc — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:15:54 -0800

I need a formula to help calculate the number of days as compared to a range. Importing a CSV for a query to show bookings within the date range of 9/1 to 9/30. Some bookings are booked through the entire month and some are partial. I need to figure out the number of days or percentage for the bookings that don't run all the way through the query range. Query Start Date: 09/01/09
Query End Date: 09/30/09

Booking1 | 02/14/09 (booking start) | 10/14/09 (booking end)
Booking2 | 03/01/09 (booking start) | 09/15/09 (booking end)
Booking3 | 06/11/09 (booking start) | 12/31/09 (booking end)

So I know that Booking 1 and 3 go through the entire month of the query range (30 days), but I need a formula to figure out how many days are in Booking 2. I know that you can apply formula to each row to subtract dates, but I have hundreds of rows. I was thinking it would read something like: "If end date is less than query end date, then subtract booking end date from query start date (and add 1)." Maybe to take it further, "else sum is 30 days"
Any help is appreciated.

Everything looks like a nail!

littlerobothead — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:44:39 -0800

Asking_for_friendFilter/ExcelFilter: I’ve built a pretty basic calculator in Excel to help people figure out how much to bill for partial months vs. full months. As you can guess, there's... Is it possible to take a value from one formula result (number of billing periods = 4) and automatically insert rows with values as listed? Is Excel even capable of this? Ideally, this would be a form for internal use only.

Number = 4
Insert 4 rows
Label with date ranges (see example below)
Insert formulas for calculating billing

Example:
Start Date: 08/12/2009
End Date: 11/11/2009
Duration: 3 months
Cost: $1000 per month
Billing Periods: 4

1st Billing Period: 08/12/2009 - 08/31/2009 20 days
2nd Billing Period: 09/01/2009 - 09/30/2009 full month
3rd Billing Period: 10/01/2009 - 10/31/2009 full month
4th Billing Period: 11/01/2009 - 11/11/2009 11 days

Number of Partial Months: 2
Number of Full Months: 2

P.S. - I'm going to try and help him build this in PHP, which should be brain-dead simple, but he'd like the Excel version of the solution too. Thanks!

Excel formulas for Dummies, please.

zardoz — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:33:27 -0800

This is probably a pretty basic Excel formula question, but I'm clueless. I have a document with some numbers in a column, and there are 6 separate sheets with these numbers. I want to change the amount of each number to one quarter its current value (times 0.25). What is the formula for this? And how do I copy that formula from cell to the full column to all the columns in the remaining sheets?

If this is too vague, please let me know.

Intense Excel Question: Calculate a rolling YTD/YTD that is dynamic?

Carialle — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 08:23:41 -0800

Intense Excel Question: Calculate a rolling YTD/YTD that is dynamic? I have a series of monthly dates formatted as 01/01/2006, 02/01/2006, etc. to the most recent data point in column A. In column B I have data. In column C I would like to calculate a rolling YTD number that is the sum of the YTD data from this year (based on the latest data point/date that is populated in column B) and divide this by the sum of the previous year's similar YTD sum. (i.e. if the latest data point is for 03/01/2008, the calculation would be (03/01/08 data +02/01/08 data + 01/01/08 data)/ (03/01/07 data +02/01/07 data +01/01/07 data).

I have been working with OFFSET and COUNTA, but I am definitely not there. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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!

complex dice probability make head esplode

DetonatedManiac — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:52:56 -0800

I need a tool to help me analyze the probability of certain events occurring regarding a pool of X dice for a game I am creating. See my examples below. I am looking for a dice statistics program or, baring that, a set of formulas I could input into excel, that can answer the following questions. Graphing capabilities are a plus.

Some of the events I want to analyze:

1) The probability that, from a pool of X dice, Y dice can be chosen by a player such that the sum of the Y dice is equal or lesser than a number N.

2) Related to the previous question; of the pools that succeed what is the distribution of how close they are to hitting N, (for instance, if the sum of Y dice is 10 and the number the player was aiming for was 12 then they are only off by 2).

3) In a pool of X dice How likely is it that there will be Z sets of doubles (say two 6s or snake eyes) and, more specifically, what are the chances of getting a specific set of doubles (say just snake eyes).

I am pretty statistics theory inept (never took it in school) but I am average to above average with math in general... basically please keep any advice in laymen terms as much as possible. Thanks

Memorizing Math Formulas

JaySunSee — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:05:59 -0800

Any tips or tricks to memorizing financial math formulas ...specifically ordinary and simple annuity due, perpetuities and present value/future compoundings? Or answer it this way: how do I kill on this upcoming math test?

Thanks!

What are the best rules, formulas and tricks in math?

dropkick — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:01:25 -0800

MeFites: Share with me your favorite math tricks, truisms and formulas that clarified and simplified math problems and made life easier in high school and college. It can be about algebra, fractions, ratios and proportions, percentages - what have you. If it relates to business math, all the better, since that's what I'm currently taking. Thank you!

How can I make rankings closer reflect votes?

bjork24 — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:59:16 -0800

In a ranking system, when you have multiple items with similar rankings, how can you give more weight to those with the most votes? For instance, one item has a 90% rating with only 2 votes, and another has an 89% with 100 votes. Is there a formula that would give more weight, or precedence, to the one with more votes?

FWIW, I'm using the formula in a PHP script.

e^i.pi+1=0

Mapes — Wed, 31 May 2006 16:15:37 -0800

Most convenient way to insert equations into web pages? I'd like to add equations to a few web pages, as shown here. The way I do this now is to use Wikipedia's markup language to generate a .png file on a Wikipedia page, then I save the file to my hard drive and call the image in HTML.

I know this can't be how the cool people do it. But I've never used Tex or Latex, and I'm pretty baffled as to which of the many editors would be best. My experience is limited to MS Word. I don't mind learning a new markup language, but the shallower the learning curve, the better.

Any suggestions for generating a good-looking page with good-looking equations?

excelfilter

thecjm — Sun, 21 May 2006 10:10:27 -0800

I need help with an Excel formula. Warning: this may venture into the realms of calculus. Maybe. We have an Excel sheet at my retail work that we use to keep track of our hourly sales, transactions, traffic, etc. We have a daily budget goal from head officeand have been tracking our past hourly sales to give ourselves hourly sales goals. We've copy the hourly sales into a seperate worksheet and then use that to figure that, for example, for the past six months Mondays from 10-11am has been 11% of our daily budget, so if this monday's budget is $5000, we should do $550 from 10-11. What we're using now just finds the average percentage of sales. We have excel add up everything in the monday 10-11 row, divide that by the total of all of mondays' sales, and then go into our "monday" worksheet and have it use that percentage on our daily budget to caluculate the hourly goal.

What we'd like to do have the more recent sales be weighted more that older sales. I could do this algebraicly (i think) if the worksheet stayed static, but every week we add the latest week's number to a new righthand column. Is there a way to find an "average" where the most recent week is weighted more than the one before it, repeated to the end of the data set? Considering that I'm adding my new data to the right of the existing data, will this throw things off? Will I ahve to turn everything around? If so is there a way to insert columns in excel where I only have say 20 columns and if I add a column of data to the leftmost it pushes all of the other columns over one to the right and deletes the rightmost column?

how much does foo cost?

the giant pill — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 22:24:28 -0800

How much money do you save by doing it yourself? For example I need a foo. It costs me 3 dollars and 1 hour to make a homemade foo, however it costs me 10 dollars to buy a storebrand foo. What is the actual cost of the store bought foo?