Does this sound familiar?
You have made an impressive presentation with lots of data and charts. You have analyzed the data so well to arrive at some really amazing conclusions. You have included several pie charts since they are easy to digest. You thought your audience are going to love it.
But your pie charts failed to evoke any response.
How to make your pie charts likable ?
Well, you don’t really want them to like your charts, you want them to like your insights, your ideas.
But, to get there, you need to shake up your audience, so that they take notice of what your charts are saying.
A simple trick for achieving this is showing charts in different formats (while retaining the meaning).
Here we will see 9 creative ways to alter your pie charts so that they can start a conversation.
- Get some bottom aligned bubbles
Bottom aligned bubbles are a new fad in visualization. You can do them by using Excel’s bubble chart. Convert the pie values in to a bubble chart. Change the X and Y co-ordinates to align the bubbles at bottom. - How about concentric circles
Concentric circles can be a good alternative to pie chart and they are very easy to do using excel’s built in bubble chart. Just make all the X and Y co-ordinates as same. - Why not slices instead of pies
Using slices instead of pies is another simple and intuitive visualization trick. For this we can use bubble chart with axis adjustments so that bottom half of the bubbles is cropped. - Use a radar chart tweak
Using Excel Radar Chart, you can make a cool alternative to pie chart. Simply copy paste the pie chart values in to few more columns (you are seeing the result of 8 columns) and fire up a radar chart with area. - A stacked bar is often tastier
Of course, the simplest and most elegant of them all, a stacked bar chart. This is also very easy to implement. - Or even a regular bar chart
- Use a tree map
Using a non-hierarchical tree map to replace pie charts is a good idea. Unfortunately making the same in excel is a bit of manual job (or VBA). For smaller set of values, the manual job is worth the effect.A simple alternative to manual job is to use Many Eye’s tree map tool
- If circle is hard to swallow, a Square Pie can Help
Square pies are a simpler alternative to pie charts. They are easy to develop using conditional formatting. Here is a tutorial. - Show them in a tag cloud
Tag clouds are a famous visualization technique. They are very easy to do (either manually or automated) in Excel. Here is a tutorial for Excel tag cloud visualization.
Added later: All these charts are effective for fewer values (<6) and with data labels.
What is your favorite Pie chart alternative?
Also check out, 14 different ways to present same data
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.