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Sentiment Analysis in MS Excel

Utilizing Microsoft Azure ML add-in to perform Sentiment Analysis within an Excel worksheet.

Modern day business tasks require us to consume ever-increasing volume of data, which often comes in an unstructured form. Whether you’re looking to get to know your customer preferences better via a survey or seek to understand their opinions on the products you sell by scraping online product reviews, chances are you will need to find a way to efficiently analyze large stacks of text. You would be best served to take advantage of a sentiment analysis tool to undertake such a labor-intensive task. Last week I had a great opportunity to share my take on understanding the basics of Sentiment Analysis with the Strategic Finance Magazine. While I briefly covered fundamentals of textual preprocessing (tokenization, POS tagging, stop word removal, stemming, etc.) as well as various ways to perform actual analysis in this journal, those who are interested in an unabridged version of this article might want to head to my LinkedIn post on this subject for a more detailed overview.

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Array Functions in MS Excel

Working with MS Excel Array Functions (FILTER, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, UNIQUE, SORT, SORTBY)

It’s hard to keep up with seemingly non-stop additions to Excel’s impressive catalog of functions. If you happen to belong to Office Beta channel you might have started working with the newest release of text and array functions. As a regular Office 365 subscriber I’ve already covered newish XLOOKUP and LAMBDA functions on this blog. It was last year when the Excel team introduced dynamic array functions, also known as spilled array functions. These functions return arrays of of values of different sizes and spill them into adjacent cells. You can usually specify how long and how wide the output ranges should be. These functions include – UNIQUE (returns unique values from the range of values), SEQUENCE (retrieves a sequence of values), SORT, SORTBY, RANDARRAY(array of random numbers based on specified parameters), and FILTER. In this post we will explore examples on how to use these functions.

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LAMBDA Function - MS Excel - MPG

Having fun with Excel LAMBDA function – building a BMI calculator and MPG conversion formulas

Let’s face it, despite the ever-growing catalog of 500(!) or so Excel functions, we cannot expect Microsoft developers to create all functions that meet the needs of every Excel user. Even if this feat were possible, the program itself would become unusable due to the sheer number of functions made available blocking us from using a few that we actually need. Traditional solution is age-old – using VBA to code a User Defined Function (UDF.) In fact, we’ve already covered the process of creating UDFs here and here.

Fast forward to 2016, when Excel teased the idea of the LAMBDA function, initially limiting its release to Office 365 subscribers opted in into the Office Insider edition. Since then this “ultimate” Excel function went through a number of revisions and enhancements and while it didn’t make its wider debut in time for Excel 2021 version, it was eventually released to the general public (i.e. all current Office 365 subscribers) earlier this month. We can now create a custom Excel function without having to deal with the Visual Basic Editor window ever again.

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XLOOKUP Function

I personally don’t know why it took this long for Microsoft Excel team to create XLOOKUP function. The fact that VLOOKUP is considered to be one of Excel’s most widely used functions reflects a strong demand in string look up tabulations. Surely, a multitude of VLOOKUP‘s limitations can be overcome with patience, helper columns, INDEX/MATCH, CHOOSE, OFFSET and other constructs. Yet, why would we use any workarounds, when we would rather utilize a more powerful function with multitude of applications? Meet, much anticipated XLOOKUP function, which was officially released to Office 365 subscribers in early February of this year. It offers a really long list of additional benefits; in today’s tutorial we will review 11 scenarios that take full advantage of the following XLOOKUP features:

  • LEFT lookup
  • Horizontal lookup
  • Multi-cell/array retrieval
  • Match based on wildcard conditions
  • Combination of Vertical AND Horizontal lookups
  • Lookup based on multiple criteria
  • Lookup in reverse order
  • Lookup for maximum/minimum values
  • Built-in Error Handling
  • Exact match by default
  • Flexible approximate match

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