Epilogue

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Epilogue

Thank you for the great training session!  Below you will find a summary of your feedback, and answers to your questions that arose during the training.

IFERROR or ISERROR?

During our discussion on VLOOKUP, we had some questions on how we could show "Not Found".

It turns out either ISERROR or IFERROR will work, with the latter being a bit simpler.

Let us first look at IFERROR with a simple example.

IFERROR(2/0, "Not feasible")

This will return a text string "Not feasible", because you cannot divide any number with zero.  Excel will complain with a #DIV/0! error.

ISERROR, on the other hand, has only one argument, and it just returns a TRUE or FALSE. For example,

ISERROR(2/0) will return a TRUE

So, to prevent an error in VLOOKUP, you can use

=IF(ISERROR(VLOOKUP(...)),"Not Found",VLOOKUP(...))

Or, just simply,

=IFERROR(VLOOKUP(...),"Not Found")

How to reference a cell in a PivotTable

Another great question that I received is how to dynamically reference a cell in a PivotTable, so that you do not lose that value even when the PivotTable has changed its layout. The article below provides a very good answer.

Which types of charts to draw?

Someone asked: "Is there any guideline in helping me decide which types of graphs to draw for a particular situation?"  What a great question.

Let me share with you a picture: (source: http://extremepresentation.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/choosing_a_good.html)

 

I like it because it covers most types of charts used in business communications.

Download the above chart chooser as a PDF.