Combinations, Combinations. A challenge

In case you’re bored stiff during your holiday, here’s a nice Excel challenge for you all.

In my newsletter for May 2019 I showed you a trick to get all possible combinations of two lists. This time I have a related problem. Suppose I have 10 ballot tickets. My job is to draw 5 random tickets from that set of 10 repeatedly until I have drawn all possible combinations:

The challenge I would like to give you all:
Please use any technique in Excel to list all possible unique combinations of ticket numbers drawn this way. Note that the order in which the tickets are drawn makes no difference and that each number can only be drawn once per set of 5. This means that a draw of (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is considered the same as (5, 4, 3, 2, 1) or (2, 1, 3, 4, 5).

What’s in it for you?

The 5 best submissions will receive:

Send your solutions to info@jkp-ads.com using this subject line: “JKPADS Combinations Challenge”

Submission ends on September 9, 2019

The Amsterdam Excel Summit 2018

Hi Excel lovers,

Wanted to draw your attention to our fifth

Amsterdam Excel Summit

June 7 and 8 , 2018

We’ve worked hard to get an exciting line-up of speakers presenting on a wide variety of Excel subjects during our two-day conference.

So if you’re an Excel power-user, this is one of those one-of-a-kind conferences you cannot afford to miss!

Registration is now open

Hope to see you in Amsterdam on June 7 and 8 2018!

Jan Karel Pieterse, Tony de Jonker

topexcelclass.com

The Amsterdam Excel Summit 2017

Hi Excel lovers,

Wanted to draw your attention to our fourth

Amsterdam Excel Summit

April 18 and 19, 2017

We’ve worked hard to get an exciting line-up of speakers presenting on a wide variety of Excel subjects during our two-day conference.

So if you’re an Excel power-user, this is one of those one-of-a-kind conferences you cannot afford to miss!

Registration is now open

Hope to see you in Amsterdam on April 18 and 19 2017!

Jan Karel Pieterse, Tony de Jonker

topexcelclass.com

Data Comparison Tricks

Hey Dick, thanks for having me over. Wow, it’s even nicer in here than I imagined. Look at all those posts! Hey, is that an Office XP beer stein… where’d you get that? Gosh, do you really wear all these baseball caps?

Okay, well great to be here. I hope I don’t blow it. I’m going to talk about a fairly pedestrian topic, but one I deal with daily as a data analyst and report writer: comparing versions of output data.

At my work we have a report modification and publication process to verify that they’re outputting reasonable results. A lot of times this means comparing a report to its previous published version and confirming that the outputs are identical before moving on with the process.

I’ll show some tricks I use to do these comparisons. Please note these examples all assume the data you’re comparing is easily re-creatable, e.g., it comes from a data connection or was exported from another tool. In other words, don’t do these tests on the only copy of your output!

The Most Basic of Tricks – Comparing Sums

One quick trick you’ve probably used is to grab an entire column of output and check its SUM in the status bar. Aside from comparing row counts, this is about as simple as it gets.

Status bar sum

I usually just look at the first three or so digits and the last three or so, mumble them to myself, switch to the other column and mumble those to myself. If my mumblings match, I call it good.

Mind you, I only do this as an informal check. Still, writing this got me to wondering how reliable it is, and about the likelihood of a false positive, a coincidental match. So I did a little test and filled two columns with RandBetween formulas then wrote a bit of VBA to recalculate them repeatedly and record the number of times their sums matched. With two columns of 1000 numbers, each filled with whole numbers between 1 and 1000, I averaged around three matches per 100,000 runs, or a .003% chance of a coincidental match. That’s a pretty small range of numbers though, equivalent to a span from one cent to ten dollars. So I upped it to whole numbers between one and a million, similar to one cent to 10,000 dollars. With a million calculations of 1000 rows there were no coincidental matching totals.

A More Thorough Trick – Compare All Cells

When I really want to make sure two sets of data with the same number of rows and columns match cell for cell, I do the obvious and … compare every cell. That could look something like this (but eventually won’t, so stick with me):

AND compare 1

The two sets of data (a modified version of the indispensable table from celeb-height-weight.psyphil.com) are on the left, with the comparison formulas for each cell on the right. In this case they all match and return TRUE:

If you’ve got more than a few columns and rows, you probably don’t want to scan all the comparison cells for FALSEs. Instead, you can wrap up all these comparisons in a single AND, like this. It will return FALSE if any of the referenced cells are FALSE:

AND compare 2

Or just eliminate the middleperson altogether with a single AND in an array formula:

AND compare 3

What If They Don’t All Match?

If they don’t all match you can add conditional formatting to highlight the FALSEs…

Conditional Formatting for FALSEs

… or just add it directly to the two tables. However, rather than conditional formatting I’d use a per-row AND array formula and filter to FALSE:

per-row ANDs

Same Data, Different Order

Sometimes my rows of data are the same, but they’re out of order. I try not to yell at them like Al Pacino. Instead I might test them with a COUNTIF(S) formula, like so, which just counts how many times the name in a the second table appears in the first table:

=COUNTIF($A$2:$A$131,E2)

To compare whole rows, you’re stuck (I think) with longer COUNTIFS formulas than I care to deal with. I’d rather concatenate the rows and compare the results with a COUNTIF. I don’t have many worksheet UDFs in my tools addin, but one exception is Rick Rothstein’s CONCAT function, which I found on Debra’s blog. It’s great because, unlike Excel’s Concatenate function, it allows you to specify a whole range, rather than listing each cell individually.

COUNTIFs can get slow though once you’ve got a few thousand rows of them. So, another approach is just to sort the outputs identically and then use an AND to compare them. Here’s a function I wrote to sort all the columns in a table:


Sub BlindlySortTable()
Dim lo As Excel.ListObject
Dim loCol As Excel.ListColumn

Set lo = ActiveCell.ListObject
With lo
.Sort.SortFields.Clear
For Each loCol In .ListColumns
.Sort.SortFields.Add _
Key:=loCol.DataBodyRange, SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, Order:=xlAscending, DataOption:=xlSortNormal
Next loCol
With .Sort
.Header = xlYes
.MatchCase = False
.Apply
End With
End With
End Sub

At this point I should mention that I almost always work with Tables (VBA ListObjects) when doing these comparisons. A lot of the time I’ve stuffed the SQL right into the Table’s data connection. If the data is imported from something like Crystal Reports, I’ll convert it to a table before working with it.

Using Pivot Tables For Comparing Data – Fun!

As I get farther along in a report’s development, odds are I might just want to compare a subset of the old version to the whole new version, or vice-versa. Using pivot tables is great for this. Say for instance my new report is only for people whose weight is under 48 kilograms. I’d like to compare the output of the new report to a filtered list from the older version and confirm that I’m returning the same weights for the people in the new subset. A pivot table makes this easy:

Pivot compare

The pivot on the left, based on the original data, has been filtered by weight and compared to the pivot on the right, based on the new, less-than-48 data. An AND formula confirms whether the data in the new one matches the original.

I was doing this the other day with multiple subsets, causing the pivots to resize. I thought “wouldn’t it be cool to have a function that returns a range equal to a pivot table’s data area?” The answer was “yes,” so I wrote one. It returns either the used range or the data area of a table or pivot table associated with the cell passed to it. Here’s the code:


Public Enum GetRangeType
UsedRange '0
'CurrentRegion - can't get to work in UDF in worksheet, just returns passed cell
PivotTable '1
ListObject '2
End Enum

Public Function GetRange(StartingPoint As Excel.Range, RangeType As GetRangeType) As Excel.Range
Dim GotRange As Excel.Range

With StartingPoint
Select Case RangeType
Case GetRangeType.UsedRange
Set GotRange = .Worksheet.UsedRange
Case GetRangeType.PivotTable
Set GotRange = .PivotTable.TableRange1
Case GetRangeType.ListObject
Set GotRange = .ListObject.Range
End Select
End With
Set GetRange = GotRange
End Function

The array-entered formula in H1 in the picture above becomes…

=GetRange(A3,1)= GetRange(E3,1)

… where 1 is a pivot table. You’ll note that the code itself uses the enum variable, which would be great if you could use the enums in a UDF. Also, you’ll see that I tried to have a cell’s CurrentRegion as an option but that doesn’t work. When returned to a UDF called from a worksheet, CurrentRegion just returns the cell the formula is in.

So Long

Okay then, see you later Dick. Thanks again for the invite. It means a lot to me.

No, no, don’t get up… I can show myself out and it looks like you’re working on something there. Wait a minute… no it couldn’t be… for a second there it looked like you were using a mouse… Must have been a trick of the light.

Cheers!

Where to Find Data

Of course I use my sample data generator when I need some sample data. But sometimes I want some real data. I looked high and low for data sources to include in the upcoming 101 Ready to Use Excel Formulas book that Mike and I are writing. If you like data as much as I do, there might be a few sources you haven’t found on my pinboard page.

https://pinboard.in/u:dkusleika/t:data/

If you have a good one that’s not on that page, leave it in the comments.

Generate random numbers in MS Excel

A common requirement is to generate a set of random numbers that meet some underlying criterion. For example, a set of numbers that are uniformly distributed from 1 to 100. Alternatively, one might want random numbers from some other distribution such as a standard normal distribution.

While there are specialized algorithms to generate random numbers from specific distributions, a common approach relies on generating uniform random numbers and then using the inverse function of the desired distribution. For example, to generate a random number from a standard normal distribution, use =NORM.S.INV(RAND())

Another common requirement is the generation of integer random numbers from a uniform distribution. This might be to select people for something like, say, training, or a drug test. Or, it might be to pick a winner for a door prize at a social event. It might also be to assign players to groups for a sport tournament such as golf.

For a version in a page by itself (i.e., not in a scrollable iframe as below) visit http://www.tushar-mehta.com/publish_train/xl_vba_cases/0806%20generate%20random%20numbers.shtml

Tushar Mehta

Analyze ‘free’ money

Recently, I received yet another promotion from yet another company offering me money at zero percent interest with the predictable asterisk next to the zero percent. Instead of just shredding the offer I decided to create a downloadable Excel template to analyze the offer, which was an interest-free 18 month loan for a 4% transaction fee with a minimum $10 fee.

Obviously, the transaction fee makes sure that the money is not ‘free.’ So, how does one calculate the cost of even the best emergency loans? I settled on an “effective interest rate.”

image001

For a version in a page by itself (i.e., not in a scrollable iframe as below) visit http://www.tushar-mehta.com/publish_train/xl_vba_cases/0920%20free%20money.shtml

Tushar Mehta

TM Goal Seek

TM Goal Seek enhances the existing user interface to Excel’s Goal Seek feature. The built in Goal Seek is a simple optimization tool that suffices for a large number of scenarios. The UI, unfortunately, is extremely unwieldy and unfriendly. TM Goal Seek is a simple add-in that is easier to use than the default dialog box because of three critical benefits:

  1. The target value can be a number or a reference to a cell that contains a number,
  2. The add-in retains values previously entered in the dialog box, and
  3. One can interact with the worksheet even with the dialog box open.

The motivation to develop the add-in came from work I was doing for a client who managed gambling sites not on gamstop that involved risk analysis on multiple investment scenarios of financial derivative trades. The default Goal Seek interface took way too long.

The current version of the add-in will expire on May 1, 2013.

For more see http://www.tushar-mehta.com/excel/software/goal_seek/index.htm

Tushar Mehta