Or more appropriately titled, the one where Power Query solves the problem in less time than it takes you to say Get & Transform Data.
Recently, one of my students Mr. K, sent me a pivot table problem.
Today my boss asked me “how much we paid to staff since the inception of our business with their respective date of joining?” He wanted to know, level wise summary of the last 16 years (on Quarterly / Year wise basis).
The records appended from the database month wise. Have a look to the file and give your ideas.
Mr. K’s data looked like this.
and his boss wanted a report like this:
What now?
The obvious solution – VLOOKUPs and patience
Even before I could go thru Mr. K’s problem and reply to him, he wrote back to me saying that he found the solution.
He used what I call as VLOOKUP and patience method. First he unpivoted original data using 233,000+ VLOOKUPs . Then he created a new pivot table from this unpivoted data to answer his boss’s questions.
While this method is fine, it consumes a lot of time and coffee.
A better solution – Power Query and pop corn
We, humans are not evolved to write two hundred thousand VLOOKUPs in afternoons. We are better at building powerful machines, watch them do bad ass work while we chew delicious pop corn.
So why not let the computer solve the problem?
Here is the ridiculously simple four step tutorial to get the same results.
- Load the data in to Power Query using From Table feature.
- Unpivot all the monthly data columns
- Load the data in to Excel as a new table
- Pivot it to create the report we need.
All this takes less than 15 seconds. Whenever you have new data, simply refresh the connection and everything (PQ, Pivot tables) gets updated.
Download the example workbook
Here is the workbook just in case you need to see everything. Please use Excel 2013 or above to play with this.
More power to you
Power Query is a truly remarkable feature of Excel. It saves you a lot of time and hassle. If you are new to Power Query (also known as Get & Transform data in Excel 2016), check out below tutorials to get started.
- Introduction to Power Query
- Import and work with web data using PQ
- Unpivot data with Power Query – an example
How would you solve this?
Prior to Power Query, I would have used VBA (as there is a lot of data) for something like this. For smaller data sets, I would have used VLOOKUPs.
What about you? What method would you use to rearrange data like this? Please share your tips in the comments section.
8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...