Today we will learn about Pivot Table Report Filters.
We all know that Pivot Tables help us analyze and report massive amount of data in little time. Excel has several useful pivot table features to help us make all sorts of reports and charts.
Report Filters are one such thing.
How do Report Filters help you?
Let us say, you are an analyst at ACME Inc., that has 3 products – Fastcar, Rapidzoo and Superglue. You have 4 salespersons – Joseph, Lawrence, Maria & Matt. You operate in 3 regions – West, North and Middle.
Now, you are given the data for all sales from Jan 2007 to July 2009 and your boss asks you, “I need a report on sales by product and salesperson in each region”.
This is where a Report filter would help you.
You can put Salesperson in Row label area, Product in Column area, net sales in value field area and region in report filter area of the pivot table. Then, you get a report like this:
You can immediately switch the report filter to other regions (or a combination of them) to produce the region-wise reports.
Generating Multiple Reports from One Pivot Table:
Using Report Filters, we can quickly generate multiple pivot reports. For this,
1) Click anywhere inside pivot table, and go to Options ribbon.
2) From here, click on little down arrow next to options, choose “Show Report Filter Pages”.
3) Select the filter field for which you want multiple pages.
4) Done! Excel produces multiple worksheets, one each for a report filter setting.
See this demo:
Few more tips on using Report Filters
Add Multiple Report Filters
You can add more than one report filter to a pivot table. This is a very useful way to slice and dice your data when you have lots of columns (dimensions). For eg., you could add report filters on Month, Region & Product.
Show Report Filters in rows or columns
From Pivot Table Options, you can set how Excel should layout the report filters. This setting is available in Layout & Format Tab.
Select More than one value for Report Filter
By default, Excel allows you to specify only one value per filter. But you can over-ride this by using the “Select multiple items” check-box in report filter.
Download Report Filters Demo Workbook
I have made a demo workbook showing how you can generate multiple reports from same pivot table. Go ahead and download the workbook.
Click here to download Report Filter Demo Workbook.
How do you use Report Filters
I often use Report filters to generate reports for a specific time-window or product group for my small business. I generally do this while analyzing sales or something. For eg. I would make a pivot chart with sales data and add a trend-line to it. Then I would change the report filter to instantly understand the trend for a different product. I like the power report filters give me in situations like this.
What about you? Have you used Report Filters before? In what situations do you find report filters help-ful. Please share your experience & tips using comments.
More Articles on Pivot Tables
If you would like learn more about Pivot Tables, go thru these articles:
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.