In the 18th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets loose your Pivot table virginity.
Note: This is a short format episode. Less time to listen, but just as much awesome.

First some good news!
Our podcast crossed 100k downloads. Yay!!!
That is right. It took us 6 months & 17 episodes to reach this milestone.
Thanks for loving Chandoo.org podcast. You are awesome.
PS: If you have not already subscribed, get it here from iTunes (other ways to subscribe).
What is in this session?
Pivot tables are a very powerful & quick way to analyze data and get reports from Excel. But surprisingly, not many use them. Today, lets bust your pivot table virginity and understand the concepts like pivoting, values, labels, filters, groups and more.
In this podcast, you will learn,
- Announcements
- What is a Pivot Table?
- Example of business data & reporting needs
- Terms to understand
- Labels
- Values
- Groups
- Filters
- Report filters
- Slicers
- Label & Value filters
- Creating your first pivot table
- Learning more about pivot tables
Go ahead and listen to the show
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
Links & Resources mentioned in this session:
Excel Pivot Tables – Introduction, Examples, Tutorials & Tips
Advanced Pivot Table concepts
- Introduction to Excel 2013 data model & relationship features
- Grouping Data in Pivot Tables
- Report Filters – what are they and how to use them?
- Slicers – What are they and how to use [example dashboard]
- Value filters – showing top 10 values
Pivot Table uses & case studies
- Show monthly values & % change in one pivot table
- Matching transactions using pivot tables
- Calculating conversion ratio using pivot tables
- Selecting a random sample of data with pivot tables
- More on Pivot tables
Books & Courses on Pivot Tables
- Recommended book: Excel 2013 pivot table data crunching by Mike Alexander & Bill Jelen
- Recommended course: Excel School online training program
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
You & Pivot tables… tell me all the racy stories
I lost my pivot table virginity in 2005. But I quickly regained it as I did not use them much for next 3 years. Then I lost it for good and I am glad for that. Now a days, I use pivot tables almost every week. And they give me quick and easy solutions to many analytical problems I face.
What about you? When did you loose your pivot table virginity? How do you use them every day? Please share your tips, stories & experiences in the comments area.

















6 Responses to “Make VBA String Comparisons Case In-sensitive [Quick Tip]”
Another way to test if Target.Value equal a string constant without regard to letter casing is to use the StrCmp function...
If StrComp("yes", Target.Value, vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
' Do something
End If
That's a cool way to compare. i just converted my values to strings and used the above code to compare. worked nicely
Thanks!
In case that option just needs to be used for a single comparison, you could use
If InStr(1, "yes", Target.Value, vbTextCompare) Then
'do something
End If
as well.
Nice tip, thanks! I never even thought to think there might be an easier way.
Regarding Chronology of VB in general, the Option Compare pragma appears at the very beginning of VB, way before classes and objects arrive (with VB6 - around 2000).
Today StrComp() and InStr() function offers a more local way to compare, fully object, thus more consistent with object programming (even if VB is still interpreted).
My only question here is : "what if you want to binary compare locally with re-entering functions or concurrency (with events) ?". This will lead to a real nightmare and probably a big nasty mess to debug.
By the way, congrats for you Millions/month visits 🙂
This is nice article.
I used these examples to help my understanding. Even Instr is similar to Find but it can be case sensitive and also case insensitive.
Hope the examples below help.
Public Sub CaseSensitive2()
If InStr(1, "Look in this string", "look", vbBinaryCompare) = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub
Public Sub CaseSensitive()
If InStr("Look in this string", "look") = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub
Public Sub NotCaseSensitive()
'doing alot of case insensitive searching and whatnot, you can put Option Compare Text
If InStr(1, "Look in this string", "look", vbTextCompare) = 0 Then
MsgBox "woops, no match"
Else
MsgBox "at least one match"
End If
End Sub