PivotTables can save the day in a budget crisis

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Recent posts via RSS http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/default.aspx PivotTables can save the day in a budget crisis Doug Kim 24 Mar 2011 5: 01 PM 1 comments

This episode "Office Show" has a common dilemma: the budget figures that you want to analyze in Excel contain many rows and columns of numbers seems an impossible task to get everything resolved. Meanwhile, there is a deadline looming and mounting pressure to figure out how to save money.

This is where enter PivotTables. PivotTables are brilliant to make sense out of the walls of numbers, because I do a lot of work for you. Can automatically organize and summarize data, so you can see immediately that things such as what areas of your business are performing the best (and, unfortunately, the worst).

So really what situations call for a PivotTable? You should create one when you want to:

A sense of large amounts of data and numbers -pivot table helps you see the forest through the trees.Analyzes the data in detail -Drill down to answer specific business questions. For example, you'll be able to see which of your products are outselling the others or those that generate the most revenue.Focus on the areas that need your attention -apply specific filters to see only the data that you want to analyze.Display data from different angles -Pivot data to get the perspective you want, maybe compare data from different regions or different products.Present data in a report -a professional-looking report format will help other people easily understand the data analysis, especially if you use functionality such as conditional formatting, and sparklines. You can also include a PivotChart for SoundSentry.

We have a lot of resources on creating PivotTables from this blog post and video by Frederique Klitgaard expert PivotTable. A few other useful links:

Create or delete a PivotTable or PivotChart report

Quick start: create a PivotTable report

Overview of PivotTable reports and PivotChart

What happens if you need to connect your Excel workbook with multiple sources of data at once? Here's where PowerPivot, a free add-in for Excel, can really help. Also increases the ability to Excel in dealing with hundreds of millions of rows. We have more information about PowerPivot in a future post.

-Kim Doug and Frederique Klitgaard

1 comments Excel, Excel 2010, Excel Web Apps. # Excel 12ShareThis

 

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Comments Mertzlufft 28 Mar 2010 4: 52 PM

In Excel 2010, the drop-down menu in a PivotTable connected to ssas in now limited to 10,000 articles.  In Excel 2007, the limit was 32,000.  Is there a way to change this in 2010.

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