Saturday, August 25, 2012

Data summary options - COUNTIFS/ SUMIFS

This function was a life saver for me recently!
I have some data with 30 columns and nearly 2000 rows which needs to be regularly summed up based on a host of criteria. Add to that I need to run several slicing and dicing operations to derive different conclusions.
Now doing this with a simple SUMIF or PIVOT is difficult enough and considering the time crunch, its a nightmare!!

What I would do earlier is to get a sum of the criteria individually and then add them up together. Consider this example of some Sales data where we would need some basic data analysis.
  • Region wise PLANNED sales where previous CSAT was below 3.5
  • Region wise ACTUAL sales where previous CSAT was below 3.5
  • Similarly summation with current CSAT










 And where reports can be created as:






Now doing this with Pivot tables would mean that I would probably have to consolidate it in different pivots and then get the data in a third table for deriving the region wise sales where CSAT is above a certain value. And changing these pivots to get a new set of conclusions would have been extremely time consuming.

Now let's look at how to use the function ->

Function Description:
SUMIFS ( Sum Range, Criteria Range1, Criteria1, Criteria Range2, Criteria2, ...., Criteria RangeN, CriteriaN)

Sum Range: C3:C8 - Range of values to be summed
Criteria Range: B3:B8 - Range of values where region is stored
Criteria - "US" for summing up only US related sales values

You can quickly add any more criteria like previous CSAT > 3.5 but current CSAT > 4 etc...

Note: Please note that you will need to ensure data sanctity before using these functions as it will only pick values with "US" and something with "USA" would be missed out