compare multiple cross sections over time hypack

Once you’ve started building your data table like this you’ve lost the game as far as I’m concerned. Now you have to go away and write another 3 VLOOKUP formulas to bring across the Activity figures as well.

Let’s say you have produced a full list of products and then completed a VLOOKUP to bring in all the Sales Values for July to September, you present your table and are then asked – “That’s great but how does the Sales Volume compare?” The other problem I have with the VLOOKUP method is that it is not very agile. People get around this problem by trying to identify a full list of products and then using this to perform their VLOOKUP method. So the VLOOKUP trick only allows me to compare data that is common between each list, which is not what I want. In fact there are no months where all products appeared in the sales list. If I take the July sales list and then use a vlookup formula to bring in the comparative sales value from August and September, I will run into problems because PRODUCT K and L didn’t appear on the sales report for July.

Take for example the monthly sales lists for a series of products. This can be problematic as you have to consider differences in the comparator fields or risk producing misleading analysis. I regularly see people using vlookups to compare two sources of data. Why VLOOKUP is not the best way to compare data sources In this tutorial I will demonstrate why you should add pivot table comparisons to your data analysis toolbox and forget about the inferior vlookup function. An easy and risk-free way to compare data from two or more sources is by using a pivot table.

Compare multiple cross sections over time hypack