In just about every pivot table tutorial, the writer tells you to start with a nice clean transactional data set. No blank rows, no blank columns, and no months going across the columns. David from Pennsylvania writes in to ask what to do if your dataset already is in a table with headings in the rows and columns. In Episode 493 I borrow a trick from Mike Alexander to solve this problem and make your dataset appropriate for use in a pivot table.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 277 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel podcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Today,We have a question sent in by David.
He's interested in creating a pivot table, but his data violates the rules for pivot tables.
I always say that you need transactional data.
You don't want to have a summary data.
So, here we have months going across the headings.
That is always bad when you want to try and create a pivot table from this data.
There's a really obscure trick and I got this from Mike Alexander.
Mike is my co-author on the pivot table data crunching books.
I'm not sure exactly where he picked this up from.
But it's a pretty cool trick to take this data, that's formatted.
and create Transactional data out of it.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a pivot table>data >PivotTable and PivotChart Report.
But in the first step, I'm going to choose multiple consolidation ranges.
This is one that we hardly ever talk about.
Not many people use.
we'll click Next > Say that we will allow Excel to create a single page field for me.
click Next > specify where my data is my data is here click Add Click Next.
Okay and now, we're back in step three of the pivot table wizard.
I'll just click Finish and I get a very boring pivot table.
But here is the amazing trick.
You know that if you double-click any cell in a pivot table, you get a new worksheet showing all of the data that makes up that cell.
So, what we want to do is go to the grand total for rows, grand total for columns.
Double click that cell and now we have our original data set but it's been spun into one row per every intersection of rows and columns.
Kind of amazing that works, but it is a great way to take data which is formatted with Months going across and to create a data set.
That's now suitable for creating a pivot table from.
Hey,Thanks for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
I'm Bill Jelen.
Today,We have a question sent in by David.
He's interested in creating a pivot table, but his data violates the rules for pivot tables.
I always say that you need transactional data.
You don't want to have a summary data.
So, here we have months going across the headings.
That is always bad when you want to try and create a pivot table from this data.
There's a really obscure trick and I got this from Mike Alexander.
Mike is my co-author on the pivot table data crunching books.
I'm not sure exactly where he picked this up from.
But it's a pretty cool trick to take this data, that's formatted.
and create Transactional data out of it.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a pivot table>data >PivotTable and PivotChart Report.
But in the first step, I'm going to choose multiple consolidation ranges.
This is one that we hardly ever talk about.
Not many people use.
we'll click Next > Say that we will allow Excel to create a single page field for me.
click Next > specify where my data is my data is here click Add Click Next.
Okay and now, we're back in step three of the pivot table wizard.
I'll just click Finish and I get a very boring pivot table.
But here is the amazing trick.
You know that if you double-click any cell in a pivot table, you get a new worksheet showing all of the data that makes up that cell.
So, what we want to do is go to the grand total for rows, grand total for columns.
Double click that cell and now we have our original data set but it's been spun into one row per every intersection of rows and columns.
Kind of amazing that works, but it is a great way to take data which is formatted with Months going across and to create a data set.
That's now suitable for creating a pivot table from.
Hey,Thanks for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
