Learn how to use #Excel to quickly band related values

From time to time you’ll come across datasets that you want to glean how many of a given group are related. For example test scores. With the vlookup function, it’s simple to add banding

First we need to create a little table for our bands. Name this table Banding, makes life simpler when things have names

Now apply the banding to your dataset by using VLOOKUP. Note especially the TRUE. This is the trick that makes banding work. It’s saying give me the corresponding band for a given value without going over. So the bands are 0–9, 10–19, 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, and 50+

Now the dataset is banded, you can quickly pivot to glean frequency information from your dataset