You Won't Believe These Crazy PIVOT TABLE Hacks!

You Won't Believe These Crazy PIVOT TABLE Hacks! One of the most used features in Excel are pivot tables. They save us time and effort because they do the calculations for us. And I have many videos on the channel about them. But if you want to save even more time, make sure you're going to check out these 10 Pivot Table Pro Tips that I'm going to share with you in a second. What I'd like you to do is tell me which tip is your favorite. Mine is number four. Let's go!.

You Won't Believe These Crazy PIVOT TABLE Hacks!

Tip #1: The Fast Pivot. So, I have here a table with salespeople, the order date, and the sales. And I'm going to create a final pivot table that looks like this with formatted numbers. Can you believe that I can create that from here to here with just two clicks? Yeah, two clicks. So, check this out. I'm going to click on Recommended Tables, which is in the Insert tab, and scroll down to see what we want: Salesperson by Sum of Sales. That's the second click. Two clicks.

To find a result. Yeah, I did kind of lie because I was already on the Insert tab. You're probably going to be in the Home tab. So, in theory, it's going to need three clicks. Just sounded cooler. Next tip is to adjust your pivot table fields, tools, settings. So, there's a gear icon here that not too many people explore. But there are two useful features hidden in there. Number one is this one right here. If you have a lot of columns in your data set,.

It's much easier to locate the column if you sort these A to Z. If, at any point in time, you want to go back to the data source order, you can do that by adjusting your selection. The second useful feature is the way you define the layout of these boxes. This is the layout I prefer, but it's not the default layout. The default layout is this one right here, and I find these two squashed. I prefer to change my view and work with this layout. So,.

Be aware that there are different layouts of this. Pick the one that you like best. Next tip is to use the timeline. So, the timeline is really helpful whenever you work with dates in your data. So here we have order date. We could add a timeline to this by going to PivotTable Analyze and inserting a timeline. You're going to see any date fields in here. I just have one called order date. So, I'm going.

To place a checkmark and click on OK. And that's it. I have a timeline added to my pivot table, so I can adjust my selections here and take a look at my data changing. You also have more options. You could change your selection to view quarters and adjust some settings from the timeline menu. You can, for example, change the style. And if you want to remove that border around the timeline, which is something I always do, you can do that. Just right-mouse click on one of these designs,.

Select Duplicate, go to Format, Border, and remove that border. And then you can give this a name. Click on OK. Let's go and select it, and that border is gone. You can then make adjustments to your pivot table and arrange these so it looks more professional. Next tip, and this was really cool, is to use a pivot table without showing the pivot table. Here's what I mean. I've created a sample report here with formulas. Some are coming.

From different sheets, and what I want to achieve is to use a pivot table slicer to control this, so that for each sales manager, I can click on this button and my data updates automatically. How am I using a pivot table slicer on something that's not a pivot table? Here's a secret. I'm using a hidden pivot table. Here's the big reveal. I'm going to unhide these cells. That's my hidden pivot table. All it has is the salespersons in the row. I then went ahead and added a pivot.

Table slicer by going to PivotTable Analyze and inserting a slicer, and I selected Salesperson and clicked on OK. And I got my slicer. Just adjusted the settings to make it look like this. Now, how are these referencing this? Well, they're not referencing the buttons directly, but they're referencing this one. So, notice here the formula is just referencing this, and these ones here are referencing this as well. Now, what happens if you have multi-selected more people? Well, this.

Formula currently is just picking up the first person, but you could put safeguards in place to count the number of items here. And if it's more than one, you put a specific message here or you use other formulas to get the result of the entire selection. Up to you how you want to handle this. Tip #5: Only show the top or bottom values. So, let's say I want to create a quarterly report for the salespeople, but I don't want to show all the salespersons by.

Quarter. I want to show the top three. I can easily do that using Top N. First of all, we need to add the quarters in there. We don't have quarters in our original source data, but it doesn't matter because we have something better. We have the date. At the moment, I grab the date and drop it here in rows. Notice what happens. I get categories for years, quarters, and months. Now, I'm going to remove what I don't need. I don't need the order date. I don't need.

The months. I just want to keep the years and quarters. Notice this report gets far too long. One thing I want to do is to get rid of these subtotals. I'm just going to right-mouse click on this and remove the checkmark for the subtotal. Now, we also want to remove these collapse and expansion buttons. You can easily do that by going to PivotTable Analyze and just toggling this plus-minus buttons off. Now, let's restrict this to the top three. We're going to click on this.

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    Dropdown, go to Value Filters, down here you're going to see Top N. Now, if you wanted it the

    Other way around, you wanted to show the bottom, the worst-performing people, select Bottom. In this case, we're going to go with Top. Let's change this to three. We want this by sale. So, that's my sales column. If you have more value fields, you'll be able to make your selection from here. We're going to click on OK. And now we have the top three sales managers per quarter..

    Next tip, type over fields to correct them. So, for example, let's say my manager doesn't want to see Qtr1, they want to see Quarter 1. You can make corrections directly in your pivot table, and notice it gets replicated to the other fields as well. Now, of course, it's best to make your corrections in your source data, but sometimes you can't do that. You receive it from a system, but you want it corrected in your pivot table. You can do that. You might be thinking, "Well,.

    Can I just correct the numbers?" No, you can't. If you try to, you get this pop-up. Tip #7: Repeating labels versus centering them. So, depending on your needs, let's say you need to send this off to someone who wants to create a data table and upload it to assist them. You will want to have these quarters repeated and the years repeated. There is a setting for that. If you go to PivotTable Design under Report Layout,.

    You can select Repeat All Item Labels, and that does the job. If you only want it for a specific column, you can right-mouse click, go to Field Settings, and only for the settings of this field, you can repeat the item labels or choose not to repeat them in this case. Now, on the other hand, if you want to design a nice layout for reporting, you might want to center these labels instead. Right-mouse click somewhere on your pivot table, go to PivotTable Options, and place a checkmark.

    For Merge and Center Cells with Labels, and you get this nice layout for reporting. Next tip is custom sort by dragging or typing. So, let's say here for the salespersons, I want to have a specific sort. I want to have Justin and Jack on top because I want to keep my eye on them. One way I can do this is just to grab this field and drag and drop it here. So, I'm just using my mouse here. There's no keyboard. Another way you can do this is just by typing. So,.

    Notice this says Bob. I can just type "Jack" Potter. When I press Enter, Bob shifts one cell down. And that doesn't just happen in this instance but in all instances. Next tip, calculate the difference from the previous period. So, let's say I want to get the change to the previous month here, or maybe I'm interested in getting the change to the previous year. How can I do that? All we need to do is grab our base value field, which is sales in this case,.

    Drag and drop it a second time to the pivot table. Then right-mouse click, go to Show Values As, and select Percentage Difference From. Now, we get to pick the base field. So, let's say in this case, I want to get the difference from the previous month. So, my base field is months. My base item is not February, but instead, I'm going to select Previous. So, this means the previous period that is visible here. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that this.

    Doesn't have any inbuilt time intelligence. By "previous," it doesn't mean the previous month. It means the previous cell. In this case, it happens to be the previous month. But if you're sorting everything the other way around, you have to be mindful of that. When I click on OK, I get the change to the previous month. What if I wanted it for the previous year? I'm going to go drag sales a second time in here, right-mouse click, Show Values As, Percentage Difference.

    From. This time, my base field is for years, and my base item is Previous. I'm going to click on OK, and I get the change to the previous year. I can, of course, rename these as needed. Tip #10 is to disable double-click. So, if you're in a pivot table and you want to quickly view the details of any fields, you can double-click on a value field, and it's going to create a separate page with all the details. But you might not want this behavior to happen. There.

    Is a way you can turn this off. Right-mouse click, go to PivotTable Options, under Data,

    Remove the checkmark for Enable Show Details, and click on OK. Now, when you double-click, nothing happens while this happens. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed these tips. Before you leave, don't forget to tell me which one is your favorite. And don't forget to check if you're also subscribed to the channel because if not, do consider subscribing..

    DISCLAIMER: In this description contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I'll receive a small commission. This helps support the channel and allows us to continuetomake videos like this. All Content Responsibility lies with the Channel Producer. For Download, see The Author's channel. The content of this Post was transcribed from the Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZRl7fALdjw
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