Forum Discussion
Showing entire tables
Hello all,
I am currently working on making a big campaign tracker for my company. I have different sheets per division, and within those divisions are different campaigns. (see attached image).
I am looking for a way to make this more user friendly, and avoid it getting too heavy too fast, since each campaign might end-up having 200+lines.
What I'm looking for is a way to select a campaign, and have the sheet display only that campaign. So say i select "campaign 1", the sheet would only show the entire table for "Campaign 1".
I can then navigate the campaign with simple data filtering.
So, if you have any suggestions, i'll gladly take'em.
Thank you very much community !
First, it's a common newbie mistake to make separate files with even separate tables in each file (as your image shows). That is organizing your raw information so that it's clear to humans. But it actually interferes with Excel's abilities to parse all that info if it were placed in a single database, single table. Just have one column that represents whichever division is applicable to the row, and another column that represents whichever campaign is applicable to the row.
Excel could then easily extract data for a given campaign and produce a summary report, or it could compare campaigns 1 and 2 across the company, etc.
So first. piece of advice: put all that data into a single table using columns to differentiate what are now separate sheets and separate tables within each sheet.
Then familiarize yourself with
- Pivot Table
- the new Dynamic Array functions (here's a helpful YouTube video on the latter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I9DtFOVPIg
Excel can work wonders with databases. Do what you can to get out of the way, to design your raw data so as to facilitate that.
2 Replies
First, it's a common newbie mistake to make separate files with even separate tables in each file (as your image shows). That is organizing your raw information so that it's clear to humans. But it actually interferes with Excel's abilities to parse all that info if it were placed in a single database, single table. Just have one column that represents whichever division is applicable to the row, and another column that represents whichever campaign is applicable to the row.
Excel could then easily extract data for a given campaign and produce a summary report, or it could compare campaigns 1 and 2 across the company, etc.
So first. piece of advice: put all that data into a single table using columns to differentiate what are now separate sheets and separate tables within each sheet.
Then familiarize yourself with
- Pivot Table
- the new Dynamic Array functions (here's a helpful YouTube video on the latter) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I9DtFOVPIg
Excel can work wonders with databases. Do what you can to get out of the way, to design your raw data so as to facilitate that.
- Who knew thinking like a human could be a problem ! Thank you for the insightful answer, i will try to re-organize everything into one table.
