Recently I was asked to help a manager score a series of tenders. The scenario was as follows:
- He had 10 questions for each tender application. Some questions were deemed essential. Others less so.
- He had 15 applications
- He needed to find some way to be able to quickly stay on top of the tenders as they came in.
This is what we did. You can find the completed file here.
First of all, we created a table. This just listed all the questions for every company. Each question was given a score. The scores were allocated as follows: 1 for “please don’t use ever” and 5 for “you are wonderful, can I come and live with you?”. Note that all the user had to do was put in the data at the end. They could then use Excel’s capabilities to quickly sort the data as required.
(For those of you who are interested, I quickly generated the scores by using Randbetween(1,5), copying down the formula and then using Copy, Paste Values to convert to numbers.)
Questions 1 and 2 were deemed to be essential. So I used an If combined with an Or function to identify those. (All this can be seen in the attached file)
- Convert the list to a table (Insert – Table)
- Click in the list. Then click on Design tab.
- Click on Summarize with Pivot Table
- Accept the default settings
- Add Question to Rows
- Add Company to Columns
- Add Score to Values
- Right click on Grand Total row at bottom
- Choose Sort
- Sort – Largest to smallest.
- This will ensure the company with the highest score will be on the left hand side.
- As new applications were added, all the user had to do was to hit Refresh (Options – Refresh) to update the pivot table with the new results.
If you want to try this yourself, the file with the raw data is here.
The Completed File is here. I have also included how you would add a chart with a target line to allow you to quickly assess performance.
As always if you have any questions, suggestions etc, I am always happy to hear them.
Excel Products for Sale
Here are products from some of my favourite Excel authors and bloggers. Please note these are affiliate links so I do earn a small commission from every sale.
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Xtreme Pivot Tables course
This is a very comprehensive course on pivot tables. It includes videos and workbooks. There are over 200 hours of videos on it and it takes you from having no knowledge of pivot tables to being a power user. If you know everything in this course, you know an awful lot about pivot tables. John explains the concepts in bite size chunks so they are easy to follow and even provides a tutorial spreadsheet so you can track your progress. This would be money well spent. If you would like to become the go-to person in your organisation for pivot tables, this would be an excellent starting point.
He also has a useful Pivot Table webinar…
This is also a useful chart helper.
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The PivotPower Premium add-in saves you time and effort, when working with Excel pivot tables. For example, you can quickly:
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