Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Several Hours vs One Minute

You are given a 10,000 lines product listing containing the product code and product description all combined into one column, and asked to separate the product code from the product description. Normally, with just basic Excel knowledge, you need to spend hours going through the 10,000 rows of records and type out the product code which can be 3 letters or 5 letters. Now take this test, find out how much time you need to spend on a sample of 10 records, then multiply your time by 1,000 times. This would be the time you need to spend to get this job done.

With some knowledge of Excel worksheet functions, you can use a formula to separate the 3-letter product codes from the list. But, you still need to take an hour or two to go through all the records to identify all the 5-letter product codes so that you could adjust your formula for the 5-letter product codes one by one.

Now, in our Excel training course, you can learn to apply one more formula that can help separate the product code from the product description intelligently. And the time you needed? One minute - and this is the time taken to set up the formula.

Do you know the 2 formulas you need to save you several hours on the task?

If you want to know the answer and you are not in Singapore, you can find out the answer and also learn how to work more efficiently with Excel using our online "Unleashing the Potential of Excel" course.