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:
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
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
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.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] 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 [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
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
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
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."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
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
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.
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
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??
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
[…] 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 […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
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.