Simplify reporting with Excel Custom Views
One of the most satisfying Excel blogs on the Net is Contextures. Maintained by Canadian MVP Debra Dalgleish, it combines practical advice with occasional bits of lighthearted fun (for the latter, take a look at her Excel fortune cookies post).
In recent weeks, however, she has explored an area of Excel that has obvious relevance for many accountants - Custom Views.
Many management accounting and reporting spreadsheets are built up from pools of source data that may not be relevant to those who will end up using the information. For example, you may not want a report prepared for a customer to include the pricing columns, or within a supplier report you might want to filter for a specific product. Or you may want to produce a set of departmental reports that give specific totals to their line managers (NB for these sorts of reports, you may want to investigate pivot tables first before committing yourself to the Custom Views route).
The Views-Custom View tab (View-Custom View menu in Excel 2003 and previous versions) lets you arrange the formatting, layout and print parameter and save them for future use. With a bit more tinkering with the Excel 2010 Customize Ribbon command, Dalgliesh shows how you can add your personal views to a drop down menu that appears in the Custom View area of the main Excel command Ribbon.
If you’re interested in finding out more about Custom Views, it’s probably best to see what she has to say herself:
But Dalgliesh highlights one important caveat with the command. “If you have a named Excel table in your workbook – on any sheet – the Custom Views options will not be available. Strange but true.”
