Can we make a calendar using Pivot Tables?!?
Of course we can. Today let us learn a simple technique to create calendar style reports using Pivot tables.
Thanks to Rob for inspiration
Before making any progress, let me thank Rob from PowerPivotPro for the inspiration. Recently he wrote an article explaining how to use PowerPivot & DAX formulas to create calendar charts in Excel. I applied similar technique to Pivot tables.
Demo of Pivot Calendar
See a quick demo of pivot calendar chart before learning how to do this.
Creating a Pivot Table Calendar
Step 1: Set up an entire year of dates in a list
Lets assume, we want to make the calendar for year 2012. So write that in a cell (G3). Now, in a range of 366 cells, generate all the dates for the year (2012) using simple formulas.
- First date will be =DATE(G3,1,1)
- Next 365 dates will be previous date + 1
Step 2: Calculate Day, Month, Year and Weekday
Using DAY(), MONTH(), YEAR(), WEEKDAY() calculate the day, month, year and weekday for each of the 366 days.
Step 3: Determine the week number in a month
Now comes the tricky part. We need to find out which row each date should be displayed. First take a look at this illustration.
The logic for calculating row numbers is very simple:
- First day of a month is always in row number 1.
- If a day is not Sunday, we just use previous row number
- On Sundays, we just increment the previous row number and use it.
All of this can be expressed in a simple IF formula =IF(D7=D6,IF(F7=1,G6+1,G6),1)
- D7 contains this month, D6 is previous day’s month
- F7 contains weekday, will be 1 for Sunday and 7 for Saturday
- G6 contains previous row number (weeknum)
Step 4: Dealing with Leap years
So far we are good, except for a minor glitch. Certain years have 366 days (for example 2012) while others dont. That means, depending the year, we need to either use 365 rows or 366 rows of our data while generating the pivot report. To do this, we create a named range tblDates that refers to below formula:
=IF(Calcs!$D$3,Calcs!$B$5:$G$371,Calcs!$B$5:$G$370)
Note: D3 is TRUE when an year is leap year.
Step 5: Create pivot table that shows calendar
Now, we need to create a pivot table from the range tblDates.
Set up your pivot table like this:
Step 6: Add a slicer
To enable users to select a particular month interactively, just add a slicer on months. For this,
- Select any cell in the pivot table and go to Options Ribbon > Insert Slicer
- Select Month as field to insert a slicer.
- Adjust slicer properties to show items in 6 columns (Slicer Options Ribbon > Columns)
- Done!
At this point, you can interactively select a month & see the corresponding calendar.
Related: More examples on Slicers
Further Enhancements
Now that the basic Pivot Calendar is ready, try these ideas:
- Use a spin button / slider control to interactively adjust the year. Remember, when you do this, you need to refresh the pivot table in background using a simple macro.
- Adjust week start to Monday: Likewise, you can modify your formulas to adjust weekstart to Monday or any other day you fancy.
Using Pivot Calendar as a Chart
Of course, having a mere pivot calendar is not much fun. But you can apply this idea to create a calendar chart. See this:
Calendar Chart Demo:
How to create this Calendar chart?
To keep things simple, lets understand how to create this chart with just one metric – Employee productivity.
- Once the pivot calendar is ready, we add extra rows between each line in the calendar.
- Now, lets say, we have our employee productivity details listed by date in a table.
- Then, using lookup formulas, we fetch productivity for each day in the cell below.
- Once all the values are fetched, just select all these cells and add conditional formatting > color scale to them.
- Format the color scale settings so that you get desired colors.
- And you are done!
More on Conditional Formatting
Video Explaining Pivot Calendar & Chart
Like this concept? Watch below video to understand how the whole thing is made.
[watch this video on our youtube channel]
Download Pivot Calendar Template
Click here to download pivot calendar & calendar chart templates. Play with them. Plug your own values and see what happens.
PS: You need Excel 2010 to view this file. Please enable macros to get full effect.
Do you like Pivot Calendar Idea?
I am very excited to try this out in a client project sometime soon. I think a set up like this can be used when analyzing monthly data like employee attendance, vacations, productivity, shipments, meeting schedules, project milestones etc. Since such data is represented in calendar format in real life, your audience would find calendar metaphor easy to understand. That said, any data like KPI trends, sales, visits, calls etc. should always be represented as a line /bar charts rather than calendar charts.This way, we can spot trends quickly and understand data better.
What about you? Do you like this idea? Are you planning to use a pivot calendar / calendar chart sometime in future? Please share your thoughts using comments.
Calendars & Similar ideas:
Please go thru below links to learn more about calendars & visualizing data:
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA