Ever wanted to get distinct count in Excel? You can use Pivot Table to get the answer quickly. Something like this:
Here is a simple trick to add distinct count to Excel pivot tables quickly.
Let’s say you have data like this:
As you can see, several products are repeated on each day. When you make a pivot table from this data and add product count, Excel counts all products. But we want to see just the distinct count (ie if there is a duplicate product in a day, we want to count it just once). To get distinct count in the pivot table,
These instructions work only in Excel 2016, Office 365 and Excel 2013.
- Insert a pivot table from your data
- In the create pivot dialog, enable “Add this data to data model” option.
- Once you have the pivot table canvas, add the product (or any other field for which you want to calculate distinct count) to the values area.
- Right click on the values, go to “Value field settings”.
- Summarize the value by “Distinct count”. This is the last option.
- All done!
Distinct Count in Excel Pivot Tables – Example Workbook
If you want to practice this or want to see this with an example, here is the workbook.
3 Responses to “CP049: Don’t do data dumps!!!”
Your title got me nervous because I'm all about data dumps, but not for attaching graphics to data dumps. My reason for using data dumps is when someone is trying to do analysis and their starting point is a report that's formatted in a way for a human to read. I instruct them to stop with the report and go get a data dump: just rows and columns and rows and columns.
Agreed, nearly all of my reports start with 100+ lines of simple table data.
That way you can build your functionality around pulling information from that tabled information.
Yes yes!