Over the last few years, there has been much debate about the merits and perils of Microsoft Ribbon UI in Excel 2007. Personally I think ribbon is a good way to explore an application. I have gotten used to it since I tested excel 2007 for first time. Now, during the rare occasions I work on excel 2003, I feel strange navigating through a bunch of menus to do even the simplest things (like aligning cell content vertically).
As more and more people are migrating to excel 2007 (and eventually to excel 2010) it is very important to master the ribbon UI to be productive with spreadsheets.
So to make you an excel guru, I am releasing a free learning guide to excel 2007 ribbon interface.
The learning guide has 10 pages. It explains 7 ribbons and has 3 more pages of ribbon tips. The ribbon tabs explained are,
- Home ribbon tab
- Insert ribbon tab
- Page Layout ribbon tab
- Formulas ribbon tab
- Data ribbon tab
- View ribbon tab
- Review ribbon tab
See the sample page for insert tab (click on it to see at higher resolution)
Download the free Excel 2007 learning guide now
Click here to download the Using Excel 2007 Ribbon – Learning Guide.
What is the catch?
There is no catch, except that, I am in a generous and becoming-a-daddy mood.
But if you must catch, just go ahead and sign-up for our e-mail news letter. It is free, awesome and packed with super-cool tips. And as if there is not enough free, you will also get a 25 page free e-book on using excel when you sign-up. It has 95 really fun and productive excel & charting tips.
Go…
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...