In the 18th session of Chandoo.org podcast, lets loose your Pivot table virginity.
Note: This is a short format episode. Less time to listen, but just as much awesome.
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What is in this session?
Pivot tables are a very powerful & quick way to analyze data and get reports from Excel. But surprisingly, not many use them. Today, lets bust your pivot table virginity and understand the concepts like pivoting, values, labels, filters, groups and more.
In this podcast, you will learn,
- Announcements
- What is a Pivot Table?
- Example of business data & reporting needs
- Terms to understand
- Labels
- Values
- Groups
- Filters
- Report filters
- Slicers
- Label & Value filters
- Creating your first pivot table
- Learning more about pivot tables
Go ahead and listen to the show
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Links & Resources mentioned in this session:
Excel Pivot Tables – Introduction, Examples, Tutorials & Tips
Advanced Pivot Table concepts
- Introduction to Excel 2013 data model & relationship features
- Grouping Data in Pivot Tables
- Report Filters – what are they and how to use them?
- Slicers – What are they and how to use [example dashboard]
- Value filters – showing top 10 values
Pivot Table uses & case studies
- Show monthly values & % change in one pivot table
- Matching transactions using pivot tables
- Calculating conversion ratio using pivot tables
- Selecting a random sample of data with pivot tables
- More on Pivot tables
Books & Courses on Pivot Tables
- Recommended book: Excel 2013 pivot table data crunching by Mike Alexander & Bill Jelen
- Recommended course: Excel School online training program
Transcript of this session:
Download this podcast transcript [PDF].
You & Pivot tables… tell me all the racy stories
I lost my pivot table virginity in 2005. But I quickly regained it as I did not use them much for next 3 years. Then I lost it for good and I am glad for that. Now a days, I use pivot tables almost every week. And they give me quick and easy solutions to many analytical problems I face.
What about you? When did you loose your pivot table virginity? How do you use them every day? Please share your tips, stories & experiences in the comments area.
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...