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:
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA