This week we are celebrating Office 2010 launch at chandoo.org
Office 2010 [download beta version | purchase], the latest and greatest version of Microsoft Office Productivity applications is going to be available worldwide in the next few weeks. I have been using Office 2010 beta since November last year and recently upgraded my installation to the RTM version (Ready to Manufacture, a version that is final and used for burning CDs that MS sells).
I was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my comp.
This week, we are going to celebrate launch of Office 2010 by learning,
- What is new in Excel 2010
- Introduction to Excel 2010 Spark-lines
- New Conditional Formatting Features in Excel 2010
- Making your own ribbon in Excel 2010
- Using the Backstage View in Excel 2010
(with free upgrade to Office 2010 in June)
What is new in Excel 2010?
There are a ton of new and cool features in Excel 2010. My favorite new features are,
Sparklines
These are small charts that can be shown inside a cell and are linked to data in other cells.You can insert a line chart, win-loss chart or column chart type of spark line in excel 2010. They add rich information analysis capability to mundane tables or dashboards. We learn more about using them in tomorrows article.
[meanwhile: Learn how you can make sparklines in earlier versions of Excel]
Slicers
Slicers are like visual filters. They are an easy way to slice and dice a pivot table (what is a pivot table – tutorial). A sample slicer at work is shown above.
Improved Tables & Filters
When working with tables in Excel 2010, you can see the table filtering & sorting options even when you scroll down (the column headings – A,B,C… change to table headings)
[Related: Introduction to Excel Tables]
Also, in Excel 2010, data filters have a nifty search option to quickly search and filter values you want. (I still prefer the excel 2003 style one click filtering).
New Screenshot Feature:
Now, using Excel (or any other Office 2010 app) you can grab a screenshot of any open window. This could be very useful for those of us in teaching industry as you can quickly embed screenshots in to your teaching material (like slides or documents).
Paste Previews:
There are a ton of cool paste features buried in the Paste Special Options in earlier versions of Excel. MS has bought all these to fore-front with Paste Previews feature in Office 2010.
Improved Conditional Formatting:
Excel 2010 added a lot of simple but effect improvements to conditional formatting. One of my favorites is the ability to have solid fill in a cell based on the value in it. This provides an easy way to create in-cell bar charts.
Customize Pivot Tables Quickly
Now you can easily change pivot table summary type and calculation types from Pivot Table “Options” ribbon in a click (learn how to do this in Excel 2007 and earlier).
Also you can do what-if analysis on Pivots (I am yet to try this feature).
Customize Add-ins from Developer Ribbon
In Excel 2007, if you want to customize or add a new add-in, you have to circumnavigate cape of good hope. But Excel 2010 makes it a pleasant experience again. There are two buttons, right on developer ribbon tab using which you can quickly add, change any add-ins.
(also, it seems like developer ribbon is turned on by default, which is pretty cool.)
Customize Ribbons and Define your own Ribbons
One the most beautiful and powerful features about Office products is that you can customize them as you want. You could easily add menus, change labels, and define toolbars the way you like to work. It made us feel a little powerful and awesome. Then, for some reason, MS removed most of these customizations in Office 2007 leaving us frustrated and powerless. Thankfully, they restored some of that in Office 2010. In this version of office, you can easily add new ribbons or customize existing ribbons (by adding new groups of tools).
One File Menu to Rule them all
One of the biggest WTFs in Excel 2007 is Office Button. It wasn’t immediately clear for most of us, how we should save or work with existing files as everything was hidden behind the office button. Office 2010 rectified that problem beautifully by restoring “File” menu. But the engineers at MS didn’t stop there. They also added a host of other powerful features to the file menu and branded it as “backstage view”. Kudos! [Learn more about File Menu and Backstage view on this Friday]
Many more new features:
Not just these, there are many more subtle UI enhancements, features and improvements in Excel 2010 (and all other Office products). For eg. macro recorder now works with charts too, you can double click on chart elements to format them, you can collapse ribbon with a click, there is a new UI for solver, lots of statistical formulas have improved accuracy, there is exciting PowerPivot Add-in (my review of powerpivot) to let you do poweful BI and Analysis work right from Excel and many more. [read about all changes in Excel 2010 at TechNet]
You could win a Copy of Office 2010 – Home & Student Edition
Through out this week, I will be posting about Excel 2010’s new features and how you can use them to be even more awesome. I have 2 3 free licenses of Office 2007 Home & Student Edition (free upgrade to Office 2010) to giveaway.To qualify, all you need to do is drop a comment on any of the 5 posts this week.
The contest is sponsored by Microsoft and winners will be chosen randomly.
Addendum: I got 3 licenses to giveaway. 2 of them for Indians and one for a lucky international reader.
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and tell me what your favorite feature in Excel 2010? Leave a comment to win an Office license.
Things to do:
- Download and install beta version of Office 2010
- Get a copy of Office 2007
and upgrade it free to Office 2010
- Catch up with all the Excel 2010 action at MSDN blog
- Pre-order an Excel 2010 book and one-up your knowledge (I recommend Excel 2010 Bible
or Excel 2010 Formulas
by John Walkenbach).
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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