My Friend and long time Microsoft Excel MVP, Jon Peltier has released a wonderful little excel charting utility called Cluster Stack Chart Utility.
Although my work rarely involves constructing clustered stack charts, out of curiosity I have mailed Jon and asked him if he could send me a copy of it so that I can review the product and recommend it to PHD reader community. He is kind enough to mail the add-in to me and here goes my review of the tool.
First the Basics: What is a cluster stack chart?
A cluster stack chart is a stacked column chart that also has clusters. It is an ideal type of chart to show performance of multiple products over last few quarters (years) in several regions. A very common need if you are doing sales reporting. Here are few more situations where you would need cluster stack chart:
- Efforts across various activities in each of your projects for the last few years
- Department-wise employee count in each of the branches in the last few years
- Profits for each of the products in each of the regions in the last few years
Ok, how do you make cluster stack chart in Microsoft Excel?
You can make a cluster stack chart in excel by massaging your data. Assuming you have fictitious data like this:
You can make a cluster stack chart by dividing the data in multiple series with few blank values and then plotting a regular stacked column chart. Check out the entire process on Jon’s site itself.
But, I can assure you that it is a very lengthy process and repeating it whenever you need a cluster stack chart is going to be painful. And that brings us to,
Why and what is PTS Cluster Stack Chart Utility?
It is an excel add-in that sits tight in your menu (and has its own toolbar too). To generate a cluster stack chart, all you need to do is, select your data and click on the “Clustered Stacked Chart” from either PTS Charts Menu or the PTS Charts Toolbar.
The data entry dialog looks something like this:
All you need to do is, select the data, specify how many stacks you want and tell it how many items are there in each of the stacks. When you are done, click “OK” and it creates a new sheet with your data neatly arranged in a table form (that is required for generating a clustered stacked chart) and creates a clustered stacked chart for you.
What are my impressions on this utility?
Clustered stacked charts are one of the popular charts used by lots of business users and it is strange that these are not included as part of default chart package in MS Excel (and other professional spreadsheet tools). Still, you can make them, thanks to techniques provided by Jon himself. But not without lot of manual steps. And that is where the clustered stacked chart utility can help you.
The tool comes with simple yet really useful help documentation. You can checkout the cluster stack chart documentation online if you are looking for a step by step tutorial on using the cluster stack utility.
The only gripe I have about the tool is that it uses default formatting. So if you have the excel 2003”s default color scheme, this is how your charts will look when you use the tool:
But as I pointed out, you can easily correct that using formatting of your choice without breaking the functionality and it just takes few clicks.
Should you buy the cluster stack chart utility ?
The utility is priced at $ 29 but you must buy before Feb 15, so click here (after Feb 15 the price becomes $ 39). Even if you make 2 cluster stack charts per year, you could easily save 1 hour using PTS utility and that means, you have easily extracted more than your money’s worth using this little tool.
This is a very good tool for people in finance, marketing or management positions who need to constantly make cluster stack charts using excel. Also, this tool can be a very effective way to make cluster stack charts if you ever need one for your website or project report.
So what are you waiting for? Just head over to PTS Chart utilities page and buy the cluster stack chart utility. While you are there check out the other charting utilities he has: waterfall chart and box & whisker plot utility.
PS: I have used my affiliate code to recommend this product because I think the cluster stack utility totally kicks ass. Even if I had no affiliate code, I would have recommended it, because this is a wonderful tool and Jon is an awesome person who likes to help others and I would like to help him in return by recommending his utility. So go ahead and buy it now, because the price goes up after Feb 15.
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.