The Selection Pane

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New to Excel 2007, unless JP corrects me, is the Picture Selection Pane.

This is a neat little tool which allows quick sorting and editing of the visibility of pictures and other objects on a worksheet. Those other objects includes Charts, Shapes, Word Art, Text Boxes, Pictures and other embedded objects.

Earlier this week on the Chandoo.org/Forums, Ankit asked a question about un-hiding pictures that seemed to disappear from his worksheet.

I responded with a little bit of VBA code which he was able to use to make all his pictures visible.

Sub unhide_pics()
  Set DrwObj = ActiveSheet.DrawingObjects
  For Each Pict In DrwObj
    Pict.Visible = True 'change to False to hide
  Next
End Sub

I later realized that had Ankir been using Excel 2007/10 he could have solved his problem without the need for any code.

How ?

Use the Selection Pane.

Goto a page with an object, hidden or not

Goto the Page Layout, Selection Pane tab.


What Can I Do ?

In the selection pane window you will see a list of objects that are on your worksheet. The list shows visible and non-visible (Hidden) objects.

Visibility

Each Object has a small picture beside it showing either an Eye (Visible) or a Window (see through), this indicates the visible status.


Click on an eye to hide an object,

Click on a blank pane to unhide the object

Depth Order

The location of the objects in the list also shows the position in the Depth Field of the objects. That is Objects at the top of the list are in front of those objects below it in the list.

You can move objects up or down using the re-order buttons which moves objects closer to the front or rear of other objects.

Show All/Hide All

Click on the Show All/Hide All buttons to do exactly that.

Rename Objects

Click on the name of the object and type a new name


Advanced Use

Hold Ctrl and Click on several objects in the selection pane to add them to your selection

The selected objects are highlighted in the selection pane

Right click on the objects to Group/Ungroup them

Grouped Objects are shown in the selection Pane as a group

The group can be hidden/shown or individual members of the group can be hidden/shown

Uses:

Cleanup Web Copy/Paste

If you have ever selected a large amount of text from a web site and pasted it into Excel, you will have inevitably collected several graphical objects along the way, some visible and some hidden

Use the selection Pane to select them all at once and press delete

Change Company Logos

You may have a report which you generate for differing companies

Install all the logos and Hide/Show as required.

Look for Missing Links

I have seen Excel workbooks where people have an external link and they cannot find it.

Links can be attached to Drawing Objects etc and these may be hidden.

The Selection Pane is a quick way to search for those objects without code


Let us know about your object handling problems and how you solved them in the comments below:

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23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”

  1. sam says:

    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

  2. ruve1k says:

    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.

  3. soumya says:

    Hey,
    Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating  text? 

  4. [...] 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 [...]

  5. […] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]

  6. Jon Gali says:

    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

  7. Linda says:

    Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.

  8. Danzi says:

    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."

  9. Hiren says:

    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

  10. Hiren says:

    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.

  11. Letitgo says:

    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

  12. Tushar says:

    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??

  13. Tushar says:

    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

  14. […] 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 […]

  15. Kyrene says:

    This is great thank you.

  16. Rabiul says:

    Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.

  17. 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.

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