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Posted by Dave on

On D’Hondt

On D’Hondt

For the European Parliament election in Great Britain  and Greater London Authority City wide list, a form of PR is used. Parties register lists of candidates, and voters vote for their preferred party. The counting is done using a method called the Dhondt method. This note describes the counting method and shows how an excel spreadsheet can produce the results.

Posted by Dave on

How to unpivot in Excel

How to unpivot in Excel

The need to unpivot data is a common requirement. There are a number of reasons as to why. I and my customers are primarily using  Excel on Windows and so the examples below are shown in excel and rely on excel functionality.

Posted by Dave on

Analysing the 2015 General Election

Analysing the 2015 General Election

I am fed up hearing about the PLP’s 9m votes mandate. A large number of these 9m votes will have voted for Labour candidates that lost. So I decided to calculate the number of votes cast for the PLP. So something for both political geeks and excel nerds. Here’s how I did it.

Posted by Dave on

VLOOKUP vs INDEX ( MATCH)

VLOOKUP vs INDEX ( MATCH)

How awesome is this! Excel =INDEX, is a matrix retrieve i.e. =INDEX(array, row, col) retrieves an entry from the two dimensional array. If we combine this with MATCH which returns a row number we can use these functions instead of =VLOOKUP, its allegedly faster too. MATCH operates on a column or linguistically a list.