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:
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
[…] Finding non-performing customers using Pivot Tables […]