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.
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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.
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.