In this hands-on tutorial learn how to create a simple, elegant and functional to-do list to track your projects and tasks.
Download FREE To-Do List Excel Template
Don’t want to make your formulas and formatting? You can download my ready-to-use To-Do List file and change the data as per your project.
Step 1: Set up your To-do data tables
We need two tables of data to begin with.
Table1: this is our to-do activity data table. It should have activity, optional due date and status columns at the minimum.
Table 2: This table lists all the possible status options. You can load them with below values (or come up with your own statuses).
Step 2: Link Status options to the todo Table
Once we link the “status” and “todo” tables, we can easily update the todo status, as demoed below:
To do this (excuse the pun), 
- Select the “todo status” column in our second table
- Use “Formula” ribbon > Define Name button (ALT M M), and create a name for this column. I named mine status_options
- Go back to the “Todo” table and select the status column.
- Go to Data ribbon > Data Validation and set up a List validation with source as status_options
Now our status column is linked with the options we have defined.
Step 3: Create the CANVAS for visual To-Do List
Let’s setup the canvas for our todo list. Add a blank sheet and,
- Make three columns wide enough to show the todo activities
- Add a title and format it nicely. I used the “shapes” in insert ribbon for this.
- Add a footer and do the same.
- Add background colors and tidy up as needed.
Here is a high-speed show-reel of my formatting setup.
Step 4: Formula Time
Time for some number crunching. We need to use two formulas to get the ongoing activity list and structure it for our output page.
Add another sheet for the calculations and set up below two formulas.
The formulas
Our first formula (set up in cell B3 in the calculation worksheet) fetches all the ongoing activities and sorts the data using FILTER & SORT functions.
=SORT(FILTER(todo[[Activity]:[Due-date?]],(todo[Status]="Ongoing")+(todo[Status]="")),2,1)
The second formula rearranges this data in to a single column using the TOCOL() function.
=TOCOLO(B3#)
LAST STEP: Bring everything together to make the To-Do List
Go the canvas todo list we created in step 3 and get first 12 rows of our TOCOL() output for first column, next 12 rows for the middle column and the next 12 rows for the last column.
Tidy up and format as needed.
Tadaaaa, our To-Do List is ready!
Video Tutorial - How to make a To-Do List in Excel?
If you need more help with these instructions, check out the video tutorial I made below or on my YouTube Channel.
Download FREE To-Do List Excel Template
Don’t want to make your formulas and formatting? You can download my ready-to-use To-Do List file and change the data as per your project.
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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.