Solutions for Data Science

You can do a sort of fuzzy match with VLOOKUP. If you aren‘t sure if your lookup table will contain Red , Red  Masala , or Red Masala Pvt , you can use  =VLOOKUP("Red*",Table,2,False) , and Excel will find the first item in the lookup table that starts with  Red .

MAXIFS One of the new Office 365 functions added in February 2016 is the MAXIFS function. This function, which is similar to SUMIFS, finds the largest value that meets one or more criteria: You can either hard-code the criterion as in row 7 below or point to cells as in row 9. A similar MINIFS function finds the smallest value that meets one or more criteria. While most people have probably heard of MAX and MIN, but how do you find the second largest value? Use LARGE (rows 2 and 3) or SMALL (rows 4 and 5). What if you need to sum the top seven values that meet criteria? The orange box below shows how to solve with the new Dynamic Arrays. The green box is the  Ctrl+Shift+Enter  formula required previously.

The use of worksheet protection in Excel is a little strange. Using the steps below, you can quickly protect just the formula cells in your worksheet. It seems unusual, but all 16 billion cells on a worksheet start out with their Locked property set to True. You need to unlock all of the cells first: Select all cells by using the icon above and to the left of cell A1. Press  Ctrl+1  (that is the number 1) to open the Format Cells dialog. In the Format Cells dialog, go to the Protection tab. Uncheck Locked. Click OK. While all cells are still selected, select Home, Find & Select, Formulas. At this point, only the formula cells are selected. Press  Ctrl+1  again to display the Format Cells dialog. On the Protection tab, choose Locked to lock all of the formula cells. Locking cells does nothing until you protect the worksheet. On the Review tab, choose Protect Sheet. In the Protect Sheet dialog, choose if you want people to be able to select your formula cells or no...