Walk into most car dealerships, and

you’ll see a whiteboard on the wall

showing how many cars each sales rep

sold that month. Using the tools in this

article, you can create an eye-catching

leaderboard in Excel that shows the top

three sales reps.

Calculating Totals for Each RepIn Figure 1, columns A:C are the original

data source. This might be a sales file

that’s downloaded daily into Excel, or it

might be an external query that down-

loads information from your sales system

every few minutes. Convert that range

to a table by selecting one cell in the

range and pressing Ctrl+T. The table fea-

ture, introduced in Excel 2007, allows

subsequent formulas to expand as the

table expands. You can accept the

defaults for the table. In this example, I

have typed a new name, Sales, as the

Table Name on the Table Tools Design

tab of the ribbon.

Column F contains a list of the sales

reps. You’ll have to remember to manu-

ally add or delete people as sales reps

join the company. Column G uses the

SUMIF function to get the total sales for

each sales rep. The formula in cell G2 is:

=SUMIF(Sales[Rep],F2,Sales[Amount]).

Sorting Using FormulasThe table in F1:G8 contains an alphabeti-

cal list of sales reps. You want to extract

the three sales reps with the most sales

and show them in descending order of

sales value. Column E is a formula to cal-

culate the rank of each sales rep in the

list. You might think you could use

=RANK(G2,$G$2:$G$8) in cell E2 and

copy down in the column, but this will

fail whenever two sales reps have a tie. If

two reps are tied for first, Excel will give

them each a rank of 1, and no one will

be ranked 2. New options in Excel 2010

allow you to assign each of the tied sales

rep a rank of 1.5 (which is the average

of 1 and 2), but that won’t help with the

VLOOKUP formulas to come in columns

J and K.

The solution is to add a COUNTIF to

the formula, which counts how many

records above the current record have

the exact same sales as the current

record. This way, if there’s a tie, each

sales rep is assigned a different rank.

The formula in E2 is: =RANK(G2,$G$2:

$G$8)+COUNTIF(G$1:G1,G2). As you

copy this formula down into the rest of

the column, the G$1:G1 range will

expand.

Column I contains the numbers 1, 2,

3 in sequence. VLOOKUPs in columns J

and K return the name of the sales rep

ranked first, second, and third, as well as

their sales. Cell J2 contains =VLOOKUP

($I2,$E$2:$G$8,2,FALSE), and cell K2

contains =VLOOKUP($I2,$E$2:$G$8,3,

FALSE).

Creating an Eye-Catching DisplaySmartArt diagrams share information

from Excel in bold and colorful forms.

Start out with a generic diagram using

these steps:

1. On the Insert tab, choose SmartArt.

2. Choose the List category, then the

icon for Vertical Box List. This particu-

lar diagram is well-suited to longer

phrases.

3. Add placeholder text, such as

“ABCDEF is in the lead with $9999.”

The SmartArt will automatically resize

based on the size of the placeholder

text, so try to include text of the

appropriate length.

4. On the SmartArt Tools tab, use the

TECHNOLOGY

EXCELCreate a Leaderboard in Excel

By Bill Jelen

54 S T R AT E G IC F I N A N C E I Au g u s t 2 0 1 2

Change Colors dropdown menu to

choose a color scheme. In the Smart-

Art Styles gallery, choose the second

of seven 3-D styles.

The SmartArt tool is a great way to

build a collection of shapes that dynami-

cally resize. The problem is that SmartArt

was designed for Office 2007 by the

PowerPoint team, and they never

thought of allowing the text in the

shapes to come from formulas in Excel.

You need to convert the SmartArt to

regular Excel shapes in order to populate

the content from Excel cells. This is sim-

ple in Excel 2010, but it’s a bit trickier in

Excel 2007.

In Excel 2010, choose the SmartArt

and then click Convert to Shapes on the

right side of the SmartArt tab.

In Excel 2007, select the SmartArt.

Click inside the SmartArt border, but not

on any particular shape—find a small bit

of white space. Press Ctrl+A to select all

shapes, then Ctrl+C to copy. Select a cell

in a new location in your workbook and

press Ctrl+V to paste the collection of

shapes. You can now delete the original

SmartArt.

Click on a shape that contains place-

holder text. The first

click will select the

shape with a solid

selection border. A

second click will

change that border to

a dashed line. You

can’t assign a formula

when the dashed line

is present. If you see

a dashed line, click on

the dashed line to

change back to a sol-

id line. Click in the

formula bar. Type an

equals sign (=) and the cell that contains

the text for that shape. For example,

type =L2 for the first shape. Press the

Enter key, and the placeholder text is

replaced with the result of the formula

in cell L2.

Note that the formula assigned to the

shape must be a simple reference to a

single cell. You can’t use =J2&K2 as the

formula for a shape. SF

Bill Jelen is the host of MrExcel.com and

the coauthor of Don’t Fear the Spread-

sheet. Send questions for future articles

to IMA@MrExcel.com.

Au g u s t 2 0 1 2 I S T R AT E G IC F I N A N C E 55

Figure 1