Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.
Warren Buffet
If you ever ask a project manager what they are up to, they will tell you “I have no idea“. So risks are quite common in project management. That is why I made this awesome free Excel risk map template to keep track and visualize risks.
Download Risk Map Template
If you just want risk map template, click here to download it.
For more templates on Project Management, click here.
Create your own Risk Tracker & Risk Map in Excel – Tutorial
If you want to make something similar for your work situation, then follow this tutorial.
1. Set up your risk register. For this you could use Excel Tables. Just add necessary columns – Risk ID, description, impact, likelihood and any other columns you want. Here is a sample risk register. Imagine, this table is named risks
2. Make a 5×5 empty grid and color it. In a separate Excel tab, create 5×5 (or 4×4 etc.) grid and color it as per risk color coding you follow. Make sure you add the Impact & Likelihood scale. This is how it would look.
3. Write formulas to print matching risks. We can use TEXTJOIN() formula to get all the risks that have a given impact and likelihood value.
Note: TEXTJOIN() is available only in Excel 2019 & 365.
If you do not have TEXTJOIN(), please use the VBA Excel Risk Map Generator.
For example, the formula in D2 cell (Likelihood=5, Impact=1) would be,
="• " & TEXTJOIN(CHAR(10)&"• ",TRUE, IF(risks[Likelihood]=$C2,IF(risks[Impact]=D$7,risks[Title],""),""))
This is an array formula, so press CTRL+Shift+Enter to get the result.
How does this formula work?
- We use two nested IF conditions to check if risks[Likelihood] and risks[Impact] matches $C2 and D$7 respectively.
- If they both match, we get risks[Title], else blank space “”
- We then pass this resulting array to TEXTJOIN() which combines all the matching risks with the CHAR(10)bulletspace.
- We add an extra bulletspace at start for the first risk (as TEXTJOIN will only print bullet symbol between risks, but not at front)
- CHAR(10) is the newline symbol. So when you word wrap the cell, Excel prints each risk in a new line.
What about cells with no risks? Would they not print a bullet point?
You are right my dear. We can use conditional formatting to suppress such cells. We can set the cell format code ;;; to those cells.
Related: Make cell value disappear with custom format codes
How to make this template – Video
Please watch this video tutorial to learn how the template is constructed. You can use the ideas to make something similar for your work easily.
Download Risk Map Template
- FREE Risk Map Template – works in Excel 365, 2019 with TEXTJOIN
- Excel Risk Map Generator – uses VBA, works in most versions of Excel
- Project Management Templates – 24 templates to help you manage projects better.
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.