What's your favorite thing about Excel PivotTables?

re: What's your favorite thing about Excel PivotTables?

spiderjeff — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 00:39:48 GMT

Hello , I need help ... before in excell 2003, you could put twice the info in the values section .. put one in sum and the other in count and the info was one on top of the other in one collomn but now it puts it side by side and that puts it to wide ... I want to do it klike the old version ! how can we do that

regards jeff

re: What's your favorite thing about Excel PivotTables?

Eddy Sels — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:11:06 GMT

I use it to look differntly at my data in MsAccess. It is much easier to find errors in my data when looking at it in a pivot table.

I'm not sure this is the place to mention it, but there is a bug in the 2007 version.

I have a DB with SF books and one of the authors is Julian May. In the pivot table May is, when sorted on authors name, the first record because May is also the name of a month.

re: What's your favorite thing about Excel PivotTables?

Emily Warn — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 03:20:44 GMT

Jmeyer: Thanks for chiming in and explaining your scenario, and sorry about the frustration. We’ll pass on your feedback to the product team.

JoAnn: Great! I love slicers, too (new in Excel 2010). If you want to learn more, see this post: blogs.office.com/.../dressing-up-your-slicers.aspx

And Pedro, thanks for the pointer to your DevScop add-in

Emily, the Office Blog team

re: What's your favorite thing about Excel Pivot Tables?

jmeyer — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:10:05 GMT

Everyone agrees pivot tables are AWESOME. But I think a more fruitful conversation is to discuss the things we like least about pivot tables (there aren't many). A point of frustration for me is that Pivot tables should be able to count unique instances of a data point. Using "=1/sumifs" formulas in the dataset is brilliant, but problematic if you have a very large dataset but are not using a supercomputer. In a pivot table I should be able to count the number of widgets sold in a particular month, AND the total number of unique customers to whom I sold those widgets, or the total number of stores that sold those widgets.

re: What's your favorite thing about Excel Pivot Tables?

JPaules029 — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:17:30 GMT

My new favorite features are Slicers. Filtering a pivot table was always a little challenging to me. I have some experience with pivot tables but I'm far from being a black belt with them. Slicers make it extremely easy to focus on specific data without having to struggle to figure out where I needed to click to filter it out.