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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13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”

  1. David Onder says:

    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 

    • Chandoo says:

      Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.

  2. Martin says:

    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,

  3. JMarc says:

    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

  4. Elias says:

    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

  5. RichW says:

    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.

  6. Kevin says:

    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

  7. Kevin says:

    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

  8. Kevin says:

     
    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.

  9. Bermir says:

    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.

    • Bermir says:

      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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