Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007

by Jelen, Bill; Alexander, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780789736017
• ISBN10: 0789736012
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-26
• Publisher: Que Publishing

Summary

This book consolidates all the best functionality of pivot tables into one guide that provides you with a meaningful tutorial, offering practical solutions to day-to-day problems. Within just the first 2 chapters, you will be creating basic pivot tables, increasing productivity, and producing reports in minutes instead of hours. Within the first 6 chapters, you will learn how to use pivot tables to quickly highlight your top 10 customers or bottom 5 products in profitability; quickly create analysis comparing sales this period to last period by product or region or both; easily summarize daily transactional data by month or quarter or year in a few mouse clicksall without knowing any formulas! By the end of the book, you will truly be a pivot table guru, automating pivot tables using VBA, creating pivot tables with external data in OLAP cubes, and even creating dynamic reporting systems so that your managers can answer their own queries with a few mouse clicks. bull; Take advantage of the numerous pivot table recipes bull; Create powerful summary reports in seconds bull; Build ad-hoc query tools with ease bull; Enhance your Executive Reporting bull; Filter reports to top 10 customers or products bull; Add dynamic charts to reports bull; Quickly summarize daily data by month, quarter, or year Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 Pivot Table Fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 2 Creating a Basic Pivot Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21 3 Customizing a Pivot Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 4 Controlling the Way You View Your Pivot Data . . . . . . . . . . . .83 5 Performing Calculations Within Your Pivot Tables . . . . . . . . 117 6 Using Pivot Charts and Other Visualizations . . . . . . . . . . . . .141 7 Analyzing Disparate Data Sources with Pivot Tables . . . . . . 167 8 Sharing Pivot Tables with Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 9 Working with and Analyzing OLAP Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 10 Enhancing Your Pivot Table Reports with Macros . . . . . . . . .215 11 Using VBA to Create Pivot Tables . . . . .

Author Biography

Bill Jelen is Mr. Excel! He is principal behind the leading Excel website, MrExcel.com. He honed his pivot table wizardry during a 12-year tenure as a financial analyst for a fast growing public computer firm. Armed with only a spreadsheet, he learned how to turn thousands of rows of transactional data into meaningful summaries in record time. He is an accomplished author of books on Excel and is a regular guest on “Call For Help” on TechTV Canada. As an Excel consultant, he has written Excel VBA solutions for hundreds of clients around the English-speaking world. His website hosts over 12 million page views annually.

 

Michael Alexander is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) with over 14 years experience developing business solutions with Microsoft Office, VBA, and .Net. He currently lives in Frisco, Texas, where he works as a senior program manager for a top technology firm. In his spare time, he runs a free tutorial site, www.datapigtechnologies.com, where he shares basic Access and Excel tips with intermediate users.

Table of Contents

Pivot table fundamentals	p. 11
Creating a basic pivot table	p. 21
Customizing a pivot table	p. 45
Controlling the way you view your pivot data	p. 83
Performing calculations within your pivot tables	p. 117
Using pivot charts and other visualizations	p. 141
Analyzing disparate data sources with pivot tables	p. 167
Sharing pivot tables with others	p. 189
Working with and analyzing OLAP data	p. 201
Enhancing your pivot table reports with macros	p. 215
Using VBA to create pivot tables	p. 231
Common pivot table issues and questions	p. 291
Finding pivot table commands on the Ribbon	p. 315
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction Introduction Pivot tables are the single most powerful feature in all of Excel. They came along during the 1990s when Microsoft and Lotus were locked in a bitter battle for dominance of the spreadsheet market. The race to continually add enhanced features to their respective products during the mid-90s led to many incredible features, but none as powerful as the pivot table. With a pivot table, you can take 1 million rows of transactional data and transform it into a summary report in seconds. If you can drag a mouse, you can create a pivot table. In addition to quickly summarizing and calculating data, pivot tables allow you to change your analysis on the fly by simply moving fields from one area of a report to another. There is simply no other tool in Excel that gives you the flexibility and analytical power that pivot tables can give you. What You Will Learn from This Book It is widely agreed that close to 50% of Excel users leave 80% of Excel untouched. That is, most users don't tap into the full potential of Excel's built-in utilities. Of these utilities, the most prolific by far is the pivot table. Despite the fact that pivot tables have been a cornerstone of Excel for more than 12 years now, they remain one of the most underutilized tools in the entire Microsoft Office Suite. If you have picked up this book, you are savvy enough to have heard of pivot tables or even have used them on occasion. You have a sense that pivot tables have a power that you are not using, and you want to learn how to leverage that power to quickly increase your productivity. Within the first two chapters, you will be able to create basic pivot tables, increase your productivity, and produce reports in minutes instead of hours. Within the first seven chapters, you will be able to output complex pivot reports with drill-down capabilities accompanying charts. By the end of the book, you will be able to build a dynamic pivot table reporting system. What Is New in Excel 2007's Pivot Tables Microsoft streamlined the pivot table interface to make it easier to use. In the last six versions of Excel, you generally created and modified a pivot table by dragging field names around the worksheet. Excel provided subtle visual clues about where a dropped field would appear, but these clues were too subtle for most. If you accidentally dropped a text field in the data area instead of the row area, disaster would result. Now, in Excel 2007, you can build a pivot table by checking a few boxes. Excel's IntelliSense figures out the best location for the field. To modify the default, you can drag field names around the PivotTable Field List. Also new in Excel 2007 is the easier interface for sorting and filtering fields in a pivot table. Whereas sorting was formerly hidden three levels deep in the menu system, it is now just one click away from the PivotTable Field List. Formatting such as heat maps, data bars, banded rows, and columns are now available as icons on the Excel 2007 Ribbon. Finally, Microsoft is pushing a high-end server product that allows many people to access data stored in pivot tables. It is no surprise that pivot tables play a key role in the interactivity of Excel Services for SharePoint. Skills Required to Use This Book We have created a reference that is comprehensive enough for hard-core analysts yet relevant to casual users of Excel. The bulk of the book covers how to use pivot tables in the Excel user interface. The final chapter describes how to create pivot tables in Excel's powerful VBA macro language. This means that any user who has a firm grasp of the basics (preparing data, copying, pasting, entering simple formulas) should have no problem understanding the concepts in this book. Life Before Pivot Tables Imagine that it is 1992. You ar