Excel Patience | Sort birthdays by the day and month | Insert 7 Rows Between Entries

0:00 – 2:17 Intro & Set-up
2:18 – 4:48 A dark day in Arizona
4:49 – 5:33 Sort birthdays by day and month
5:35 – 7:55 Insert 7 rows between each row

This video is primarily about patience with Excel and finding solutions. Often people will comment that I make things look so easy. In this video I take the pressure off. I reveal that a lot of solutions took a long time to find, and the 5-min tutorials mask the hard work.

So. If you take a long time finding solutions, that’s how this works. Be patient. It’s not easy.

This is demonstrated in a solution for a friend. She had over 2000 rows of data and needed to insert 7 rows between each of them. It took a half day to look for a solution. Back then I used VLOOKUP. Today I used XLOOKUP and SEQUENCE (dynamic arrays).

You’ll also see how to sort birthdays by the month and day, ignoring the year. Example:
Angelo, 12APR67
Kim, 17JAN81
Nettie, 12APR93
Pete, 1NOV88
Yukio, 29SEP96

We want to sort (ascending) so that Kim is on top because her birthday is 17JAN (earliest in the year). Pete should be on the bottom because his birthday is 1NOV.

If we were to sort the birthday column as-is, Nettie would be on top because her birthday is the most recent year, 1993. NOT WHAT WE WANT!
We use the TEXT function in order to sort and ignore the year.

#XLOOKUP
#SEQUENCE
#DynamicArrays

For a list of my Excel courses at Lynda/LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/oz-du-soleil
There are courses on Power Query, Good spreadsheet habits, and a weekly Excel challenge that comes out every Friday.

Website: https://ozdusoleil.com

My book: Guerrilla Data Analysis 2nd Edition

My old blog: http://datascopic.net/blog-2-2