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Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #322, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form. After last week's elegant FILTER formula, I have another elegant FILTER formula for you. How lucky are you!?! ;) That wasn't by design though. I thought I had an idea for this week until I checked the newsletter βarchivesβ and realized I'd covered it back in February 2024 as tip 290. So I searched my email correspondence related to that tip and found a goldmine of ideas. So today I'm sharing one of those with you. But first, a little story... When began my accounting career in 2006, one of the first things my boss had me do was download an Excel Add In that added a suite of powerful utility tools to Excel. Things like removing duplicates, merging columns, doing text transformations. All the tedious stuff that is tricky to do with formulas and can eat up all your time. Well, this tool simplified all those types of tasks by reducing them to the click of a few buttons. It was indispensable part of my spreadsheet toolkit. Fast forward to today, and I use βPower Tools in Google Sheetsβ to do the same thing. So I was delighted to partner with them for this issue. Below, I show you how to compare columns with an elegant formula. But this is also the bread-and-butter type of job that Power Tools does. So check them out below. Happy Halloween for Thursday! π β NewsI. Any AppSheet builders out there? One of the more challenging aspects of building apps with lots of users is, well, managing all those users. To solve this, my friend and fellow GDE, Vo Tu Duc, has created Onboardly, an AppSheet app to automate user onboarding and management. ββLearn more here >>β β Sheets Tip #322: Comparing two columnsIn βtip 290β (February 2024), we looked at formulas to compare two lists of numbers. Today I want to build on that and show you a nice formula that returns the values that exist in only one of the lists. Consider this data: We want to create a formula that will find all the values in column 1 that are NOT in column 2. For example, the value "FL53802" occurs in both columns, so I don't want it to show in the new list. Let's create the formula that builds this new list. Start with this βXMATCH functionβ in cell B2: =XMATCH(A2:A,D2:D) In this example, it gives an #N/A error message because it doesn't find the first value of column 1 in column 2. Wrap it with ISNA to test if it's an error or not: =ISNA(XMATCH(A2:A,D2:D)) This gives a TRUE value. So far, so good. But it's only giving an output for the first row, how do we expand it to all the rows? Ah ha! This is where the magical FILTER function really shines. It will take the array inputs and give us array outputs, without needing an array formula designation. Add in the βFILTER functionβ so that our formula in cell B2 looks like this: =FILTER(A2:A,ISNA(XMATCH(A2:A,D2:D))) And voilΓ ! Like βlast week's tipβ, this is another elegant formula that uses the special array properties of the FILTER function. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it. Have a great week! Cheers, |
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Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #338, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! After a last bite from winter last week, it looks like spring is finally here where I live on the east coast of the US. The daffodils are growing, the box turtles are out sunning themselves on logs by the river, and temperatures are forecast in the 70s (in the 20s celcius). Wherever you are, I hope you're enjoying the changing of the seasons. β News I.Google...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #337, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! I'm sharing a simple pivot table trick today that's one of those hidden gems in spreadsheets. Once you know it, you'll never go back. Suppose you create a complex pivot table and you want to create a second version so you can try a different filter perhaps. Well, today's trick lets you quickly duplicate the pivot table, rather than having to build again from the...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #336, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! This week, we're looking at use cases for the text rotation tool. I don't use it often but it's a nice technique for styling your Sheets. I've used it to add branding to my Sheets (see use case 2 below). Find tip #336 below our sponsor message and a few articles to share from the spreadsheet world. Brought to you by: BudgetSheet Save Time This Tax Season With...