如何在excel中转​​置数据

Question

I have a data set like the following in r (several thousands of artworks), a screenshot is also attached.

A            B

1              Pierre Bonnard

Title          La rue, Orgue de Barbarie    
Medium         oil on canvas
Year of Work       1911
Size           Height 63.2 cm.; Width 89.8 cm.
Sale of        Sotheby's New York: Friday, May 30, 2014 [Lot 00018]
               Impressionist & Modern Art Including Russian Art
Sold For    293,000 USD Premium

2             Eugene Berman

Title         Dormenas, statue et campanile
Medium          oil on canvas
Year of Work     1932
Size           Height 92.1 cm.; Width 73 cm.
Sale of        Sotheby's New York: Friday, May 30, 2014 [Lot 00086]
              Impressionist & Modern Art Including Russian Art
Sold For      12,500 USD Premium

I would like to transpose the dataset like the following one:

artist    title    medium   year.of.work   size   sale.of   sold.for
Pierre    ...
...

I have tried the transpose function in excel, but it is not working properly.

Answer 1

Transpose isn't going to do it for the data that you have.

Unfortunately, some of your data values seem to be spread over more than one cell, that makes it a bit more of a problem, but not insuperable.

Let's deal with the case first where the data values are always in a single cell. From the limited sample of data that would seem to be the attributes such as Artist, Title, Medium, Year of Work, Size, Misc., Estimate and Sold For.

1. Put all the headers required in your output list in a convenient row either below the existing data or on another worksheet.

2. Next select all the data in Column A of your original data set (from cell A3 down to the "Sold For" of the last painting).

3. Apply a data filter to this Selection (Data tab on ribbon, Filter Button).

4. Filter the selection in column A by clicking the down arrow in cell A3 and, when the drop-down appears, unselect the "Select All" option and then select "Title" in the list of check boxes. Your data will now be filtered so that all entries in column A have value "Title" and column B shows the titles of the paintings, starting with "La rue, Orgue de Barbarie".

5. Select all the titles showing in column B and Copy to the clipboard. Paste the selection to the cell immediately below the "Title" header created as part of Step 1. You've now got the Title column in your output.

6. Go back to the drop down in A. Select a different attribute, by unchecking "Title" and selecting eg "Medium". Col B will now have the values of the new attribute. Copy and paste to your output list. Repeat this step until all the attributes whose values are always contained in a single cell data have been added to the output list.

The artists can be selected by selecting all the numeric values in the drop-down - probably easiest to check "Select All" then uncheck the non-numerics. Or if you feel adventurous you could try using a number filter from the drop down options which show above the list of checkboxes.

The data values spread over multiple cells need processing so that each data value is contained within a single cell. This is fairly straightforward but involves use of a few formulas.

1. Make sure the "Select All" option is checked on the Data Filter on Column A
2. In cell D3 add the following formula =AND(NOT(ISBLANK(B4)),ISBLANK(A4))
3. Copy this formula down all cells in column D (cell D3 downwawrds to the end of your original data). The values in column D are now either TRUE or FALSE . TRUE indicates that the data value in column B continues in the cell below.
4. In cell C3 add the formula =B2 and in cell C4 add the formula =IF(D4,B4&C5,B4) . Copy the formula in C4 down the rest of column C so that all your original data is covered. The values in Column C are either 0 (if nothing in Col B) or the value in Column B (if the data is not continued in cell below) or the value in column B along with any continuation cells (if the value in column B is continued in the cell below). The formulas in Column C cater for the possibility that a data value might be spread over more than 2 cells in column B (though the sample data does not show any doing so).

Having got your data into shape its now pretty much as before EXCEPT having selected a data type which may spread over multiple cells such as "Description" in previous step 4., select the cells with the data values from column C rather than column B AND use Paste Values rather just Paste when applying previous step 5.

If you can follow what's going on above then you could put the formula into Cols C and D first and then copy the data values exclusively from column C (remembering that Paste Values is required rather than just Paste).

There is an underlying assumption in the above that each attribute (such as Title, Description, etc) required in your output appears once and only once in column A against each painting. This looks to be the case from the limited sample of data, but if it isn't then the output data will be misaligned across rows. eg if the Title for picture 5 is missing in the original data then what shows in the output as the titles for picture 5 will that of picture 6, title of picture 6 will be that of picture 7, etc.

There are other ways of getting to your end result, which use formulas to detect the position of each data item in column B and which then make use of the =INDIRECT and =ADDRESS functions, but the approach above is probably simpler and easier to understand.