Pivot tables are great help when analyzing lots of data. One of the common questions managers & analysts ask (when looking at monthly sales data for example) is,
How is the monthly performance of our teams (or regions, products etc.)?
A pivot report can answer this question in a snap.
But the answer is incomplete!
Why? Because, we don’t want sum of sales by month & sales person alone. We want to know their performance! Something like below:
Performance eh?!? How to measure it?
There are many ways to measure performance. For our monthly sales data, we can measure performance by comparing,
- Sales with targets
- This month value with previous month value
- This month value with same month last year value
- One person’s sale with rest of team etc.
One of the most common ways to measure performance in situations like this is to see how this months value has changed compared to previous month.
How to show monthly values & % changes in pivot?
Do you know that with just a few clicks, we can add % changes to our pivot? Follow these steps:
1. Create a pivot report with months & sales persons (or months & products, months & regions etc.)
2. Add Net sales (or any other metric) to value field area of pivot report
3. Now, add net sales once again to value field area
That is right. You can add same metric more than once to pivot table value field area.
At this point, our report looks like this:
4. Right click on 2nd value and choose value field settings.
5. Click on Show values as tab and follow below steps. (see image aside)
- Choose “% Difference from” from the drop down
- Select Month as base field
- Select (previous) as base item
- Click ok
This will show % changes with respect to previous month in the pivot report!
Extending this to make it even more awesome
1. Clean up the titles
Change the titles to Sales & % change. To do this, just select the first column title and type over. Repeat for 2nd column.
2. Add conditional formatting
Select any cell in the % change column. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > New rule
[Resource: Introduction to Excel Conditional Formatting, more]
Specify the rule as mentioned in below illustration.
3. Show just icons
We can go one more step and show just icons. Since pivot tables show tool tips on hover, we can easily find % change for any month / sales person by just pointing on that cell.
Finalized monthly report
Our final report looks like this:
Download Example Pivot Report
Click here to download this example pivot report. Examine various settings & conditional formats to learn this better.
How do you use value field calculations in Pivot reports?
Although most of my pivots use simple sum or count type of summaries, often I use custom calculations like % difference from, running total , % of row etc. to understand the data better. These are very simple to setup yet give powerful insights.
What about you? Do you use value field settings to modify your pivot reports? What other summary techniques you use? Please share your tips, ideas using comments.
More on Pivot Tables
Along with formulas, Pivot tables are best friends of Excel analysts. They can take massive amounts of data, process and summarize in just a few clicks. To learn more about them, use below resources.
22 Responses to “Master Excel 2007 Ribbon with this Free Learning Guide”
Thank you, kind sir. Well done with the baby making.
I cannot get signed up for your newsletter. I tied both this email address and churchill2001@hotmail.com. never a response.
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@Doug, it shows that your email address is pending verification. Can you check your inbox (and may be spam folder too) for an email from me? The subject will be "Activate Subscription to Get your Free Excel Tips E-book"
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Very Useful Info..Keep it up..
@Ajay.. you are welcome 🙂
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I can't open this pdf. I get the error message:
You do not have the required license to open this file.
Please request a license from the creator of the file, and add it using the license manager and they try opening it again.
What gives??
I downloaded the file again and it worked this time. Strange. (First file was 116 KB, second was 1644 KB... ???)
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Hi Chandoo,
thanks for sharing your Excel 2007 learning experience with us; unfortunately the link to the pdf of the free Excel 2007 learning guide seems broken: my Acrobate Readers flags: "Unkown file type or corrupte data".
Have a nice day
Michael
well done this is great
Can somebody just provide a link the classic TAB exportedUI files for MS Office 2003 for us to use in office 2007/2010?. searching online, everybody just wnats to make a buck online with silly Classic Tab installers which do nothing more than inport exportedUI files for you.
Don't give me a ribbon how to guide, just give me free exportedUI files. I should not have to pay anyone for this, it is free XML, MS should have included this to begin with.
thanks
Dear.
There are a set of debit values and a set ot credit values in a column. I want a vba code by whcich the debit value plus a single / multiple credit value is zero that needs to be marked .
finally i will come to know out of the avaibale debits which cannot be used the with avilable credits either single or multiple values.
If multiple matching sets are available let it take the 1st or the 2nd one its not an issue.
Column A Ref
-1000 A
-5000 B
-8000 C
800 A
100 A
100 A
2000 B
3000 B
13000
15000
hi...
how to make this add-ins and display in ribbon... check this sample : http://www.cprsoft.com/GCDemo01.htm
thank you sir...
Please tell me format painter short cut key In excel ?
Thanks In Advance
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