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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 archives 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 Power Tools in Google Sheets 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! 🎃 ➜ 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. ➜ Sheets Tip #322: Comparing two columnsIn tip 290 (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 XMATCH function 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 FILTER function so that our formula in cell B2 looks like this: =FILTER(A2:A,ISNA(XMATCH(A2:A,D2:D))) And voilà! Like last week's tip, 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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Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #328, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! This is the last Google Sheets Tips newsletter for 2024. A big thank you for being part of this journey and reading these tips. Your Monday-morning-espressos-in-spreadsheet-form will return on the 6th of January 2025. In the meantime, I wish you all a wonderful holiday season with your loved ones. Tip 328—creating a 2025 calendar with a formula—is found below, but first: ➜ 2024 In...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #327, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! Recently a reader asked about a problem importing data from one Sheet to another when the sheet names were changing. Below, we look at how to solve this and see yet another benefit of the new Google Tables feature. My family and I spent the weekend at Fairmont University in West Virginia, where my eldest son was competing in a Lego robotics competition. With his...
Brought to you by: Hi Reader, Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #326, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form! Last week, we looked at the concept of "walking the first row" to understand your data. This week, we're pairing that with the Column Stats tool. Using both of these techniques will ensure you have a full understanding of what's in your dataset and a good sense of the metrics (e.g. row count). Check it out below! Also, there is no Google Sheets Tips email next...