A very happy new year to you. May 2016 be your most awesome year yet.
This year too I plan to share tutorials, tips, podcasts & videos to make you awesome. I hope to focus on
- Excel 2016 – exploring new features
- Power BI – What is it, how does it make you awesome.
- Write a sequel to The VLOOKUP Book.
- Launch a new online course on Power BI & New Excel.
- Run 2 more batches of 50 ways to analyze data program in Feb & July 2016.
- Run another dashboard contest on Chandoo.org
- Write about awesome ways to work with data – formulas, charts, tables, pivots etc.
- Talk about many advanced and work specific Excel scenarios in the podcast
But wait, what do you want to learn more…?
While these are my plans, I want to make sure Chandoo.org helps you the best. So please take a minute and answer this one question survey.
What is the one topic / area of Excel you want to master in 2016?
Use below form to answer the question. Alternatively, you may post your answer in the comment section.
Thank you.
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...