Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.
AIA

ExcelZone's Five Minute Pivot Table Tips - Index

by
19th Jul 2006
Save content
Have you found this content useful? Use the button above to save it to your profile.

Written by David Carter and Simon Hurst, ExcelZone's series of Five Minute tips aims to develop your skills at using Excel pivot tables. If you want to try out each tip for yourself, David takes you through a worked example on a small sample database of sales invoices.

In the worked examples you will analyse the invoices to show sales by product, sales by customer, gross margins, margin percentage etc. The series is therefore relevant to sales and marketing people as well as accountants.

You don't have to work through the series in any particular order. But if you have never used pivot tables before, please do tips 1-3 first as they will get you started.

Tip 1 - First step: remove those subtotals quickly
Tip 2 - How to Group totals by month
Tip 3 - Create Page worksheets automatically
Tip 4 - Drill down on your data via Hide/Show Detail
Tip 5 - How to lay data totals side-by-side
Tip 6 - Use Formulas to create a calculated field
Tip 7 - Tips on formatting a pivot table
Tip 8 - How to Group dates manually
Tip 9 - When to use Max instead of Sum
Tip 10 - Tips on calculating monthly totals
Tip 11 - Use Top 10 to show best sellers, or maybe not
Tip 12 - Sort Rows into the order you want
Tip 13 - Use Text to Columns to enhance your data
Tip 14 - Use Vlookup to add extra fields
Tip 15 - Working with Pivot Charts
Tip 16 - Exploring PivotChart options
Tip 17 - Use Subtotals to create detailed reports
Tip 18 - Date problem: 'Cannot group that selection'
Tip 19 - Correct faulty dates with Text to Columns
Tip 20 - Change the Range name to A:K if you intend to add more records
Tip 21 - Use AutoFormat, or save as an Excel 4 worksheet
Tip 22 - Use Format Painter to tidy up drill-down worksheets
Tip 23 - Create group totals via Formulas-Calculated Item
Tip 24 - How to analyse your sales by week (1)
Tip 25 - How to analyse your sales by week (2)
Tip 26 - How to analyse sales by financial year
Tip 27 - How to analyse sales between two dates
Tip 28 - Use Get External Data to refresh your reports automatically
Tip 29 - If you use Refresh, make sure you set Advanced-AutoSort
Tip 30 - Use =MONTH and =YEAR functions to summarise dates
Tip 31 - Use a VLOOKUP table to add dates

Next step - pivot table self-teach tutorials
The sample database contains just 27 records and each of these tips should only take you 5 minutes to work through. If you want to learn more about pivot tables, there is a set of full-scale tutorials which show you how to use pivot tables for particular applications (budgeting, sales analysis, cost analysis, etc). These use much larger data sets and will take you an hour or so to work through. See Want to learn about Excel pivot tables? Start here

Related material in ExcelZone
For more than four years, David Carter and AccountingWEB members have built up a massive stockpile of material on Excel and pivot tables. To delve more deeply into the subject, see:

Replies (0)

Please login or register to join the discussion.

There are currently no replies, be the first to post a reply.