The Top N items

If you want to single out those with the highest or lowest price from the list of items, the simplest way is to turn on the Autofilter option, and then apply the Top 10 numerical filter over the column where prices are stored. There is another, equally accessible way – with the aid of the LARGE and SMALL functions, which you can use to identify the ranking of an item based on the sale price. Add to this dynamic filters and the process will be even simpler.

The first few rows

How to take the first few rows from a table? How do we make this a parameter that we can change? This feature can be useful when we simply want to retrieve the first few rows from a table, or when it contains e.g. some sales data, we can sort them in descending order by the column that contains the sales value, and then we extract  the Top 5 items.

Marking the best-selling item

When we create a column chart to visualize data, the columns are often of different heights. We evaluate where the best sales were achieved visually or add data labels and then make the conclusion based on the appropriate numbers. Excel does not yet have conditional formatting for charts, but there’s a trick you can use to automatically determine the highest value in a series.

Adjustable display units in report

When we create a sales report, sometimes we want to show the values in their original form, and sometimes they can be recalculated values, such as thousands or millions. Such a report is created in a very simple way using the Data Validation option, which allows you to select the desired unit size, and recalculate values with help of the Excel LAMBDA function. Let’s create a report like this with a chart to visualize the data.

Sales overview in selected currency

When creating business reports, there is often a requirement that they should be displayed in multiple currencies, that is, the user can choose the currency in which a report is displayed. This can be achieved in several ways and one of them, very elegant, is with the help of the LAMBDA function. In this “recipe” you will find out how you can use it to display sales reports in different currencies.