One of the regular reporting tasks I do involves a manual step I hated. It goes like this:
- Dump several columns of data in the template file.
- Hide a particular set of columns (these are not together, so must be done one at a time or with CTRL+selection)
- Save and publish the file.
After doing this manually for last few fortnights, today I wanted to automate the column hide process. I was about to write a VBA macro to clone the hide settings from one workbook to another. But then I thought, may be paste special can be of use.
And what do you know. It does exactly that.
- Copy a row of cells in original report, doesn’t matter which ones
- Paste special > column widths (ALT+ESW) on the new report
- Any hidden columns in original will be set to ‘0’ width, thus becoming hidden in new report.
- Bingo!
Here is a quick demo of this in action. Check it out and apply next time you are doing something tedious like this.
There you go. Paste prevents painful problems.
Other ways Paste Special saves the day
Paste special is one of the top time saving features in Excel. Here are few of my favorite paste special tricks.
- Format faster with paste special & double click
- Remove data validation rules with paste special
- Speed up chart formatting (yes, you read it right) with paste special
- Convert numbers stored as text with paste special
- More awesome paste special tips
What is your favorite Paste Special moment?
Let’s get personal. What is your favorite paste special moment? Share it in the comments.
5 Responses to “Preparing Profit / Loss Pivot Reports [Part 2 of 6]”
[...] Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet [...]
[...] Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet [...]
[...] Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet [...]
I am not getting sound from the videos. I have checked all the settings and spent several hours searching the Internet to no avail.
Has anyone else had this problem?
Is there anyway to get the Grand Total to be broken out in the same fashion as the items above it? For instance, if you have in column 1, widget a, widget b, and have their sales by month in column 2, I'd like to see the grand total also be by month, for widget a & b combined.
I can't get anything other than a single line for the grand total, rather than the same format as the data above.
Widget A Month Sales
Jan 100
Feb 200
Widget B
Jan 150
Feb 250
Grand total - here I would also like to have Jan, Feb.
Jan 250
Feb 450