Forum Discussion
Looking ways to Automate Board Financials
Is it at all possible for you to render any actual names or other identifiers anonymous and then upload the actual sheets. In the absence of actually seeing what you're working with, it's awfully hard to give anything other than VERY general suggestions. And it sounds as if you've already got enough knowledge to know some general ideas....the very fact that you're talking of dynamic arrays (for example) suggests that you're not a total novice.
Old spreadsheets, though, can be something of a challenge, because new features often do expect certain layouts....anyway, I'm sure there are people here who could help, but we'd be far better equipped to help you if we could see the actual spreadsheets.
mathetes
Hi Mathetes
Thank you for your feedback. As advised, I have prepared the sample to excel data spreadsheet that only consists of a few values and rows. Remember the one I am working have hundreds of rows and multiple worksheets and I can't change any formatting and also impossible to create new charts that are the combination of a variety of different layouts. In this excel I added the data since Feb 18 MM, YYYY but I only took the values of YTD since Jan 19. I do hide the other rows in the real dataset that I don't consider to mention in the graphs however I didn't hide in this excel sheet. I want to automate at this point, if I input any values in row # 48 to add Mar 20 values in automatically update/reflect into my charts. Any help in this regard will be appreciated
Thank you
The only thing I've done here at this point is to convert your data into a Table, named "Table1," and made that (by designating "=Table1" as the data range for the chart) the data source for the two charts. Doing those two steps has the result of the charts automatically including any new rows as they get added.
So that's a start. Let us know if this resolves your situation. I'm going to guess that it won't fully, but you will need to come back with more details if more is needed.
Hi Mathetes
Thank you for your support. However, I do have some concerns to discuss
- First, how did you create the Table and assign the Table Name? Did you use CTRL + T command?
- Second, how did you choose the data source?
- Now, if you go back to my first concern/explanation and spreadsheet, I mentioned “In this excel I added the data since Feb 18 MM, YYYY but I only took the values of YTD since Jan 19. I do hide the other rows in the real working dataset/spreadsheet that I don't consider to mention in the graphs however I didn't hide in this excel sheet.” That being said, I need to customize my chart data, when you create the table and choose data from the table then you are selecting the data from the beginning if I am not correct. We can customize it manually but in this case, I want to automate that I need the data select of the last year only. For instance, if I am creating a report of April 20 then my data point will start from April 19 to April 20 and if I make a report May 20 then it will be May 19 to May 20. I hope it does make any sense.
Let me know if you have any questions
Thank you once again
- First, how did you create the Table and assign the Table Name? Did you use CTRL + T command?
I selected the whole data set, headings included, and used Insert....Table. The name was assigned by Excel and can be changed.
- Second, how did you choose the data source?
Right click with the cursor in the chart; then pick "Select Data...." from the menu that appears. At that point the image that I included with the last one shows that I just entered "=Table1" as the source data.
As to the rest of your questions, I'd have to do a lot of playing around with such steps as
(a) setting some start and finish dates for any reporting you want (as user-established variables) somewhere on one of your sheets
(b) the use of OFFSET and INDIRECT (or some such) to determine the dimensions of the subset of the full dataset that you want included.
In other words, I'm not sure how I'd resolve all of your concerns in order to make this fully automated. The restrictions you've articulated -- no freedom to change layouts, etc.--are probably things I'd want to challenge. Anyway, at this point I am interested in seeing what others come up with. I've used INDIRECT and OFFSET and the like on some of my own projects, but I'd need to "play" with them, which will take time. So I'm hoping some of the far more-expert experts here will chime in.
In the meantime, are you comfortable digging in yourself to see whether you could use functions such as those two I mentioned? Make a copy of your data that you can use without destroying anything... And then use sites like https://exceljet.net/ to explore both how to use those functions, but also follow their cross-references to other features. That's what I would do were I in your place.