A big, warm & pleasant hello to you.
I wish you a merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2015. May your holidays be filled with joy, togetherness, celebrations and fulfillment. May your new year be filled with hope, energy and awesomeness.
I want to tell you how thankful I am for all your support in this year. Every time you visit our website, read an article, leave a comment, enroll in a course, purchase a product, read one of my books, listen to a podcast episode, watch a video or tell your friends about Chandoo.org, I feel nothing but gratitude, thankfulness and amazement. 2014 is the most successful year since starting Chandoo.org, all thanks to you. Heartfelt thanks to you, from my family, staff and volunteers.
About this year’s holiday card
We took this picture recently when we went to Udaipur (a city in northern India). For a change, no one closed their eyes when the camera clicked. Click on the picture to enlarge.
A holiday gift for you…
It gives me immense pleasure to give a gift to you this holiday season. Unfortunately, my sleigh is no where to be found and the reindeer have wandered away. So I can’t drop this gift thru your chimney. Would you be a darling and download it by clicking below button? 🙂
Special Holiday Podcast
Here is a special holiday greeting for all our podcast listeners.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | RSS
Click here to download the MP3 audio of this podcast
Holiday schedule of Chandoo.org
This year, I am going to lie low and let my kids take over the blog during holiday season.
I am just kidding. 😉
Even though my kids will not be posting anything, I will try to make some time to update the blog during next 2 weeks. Here is what you can expect.
- 29 December (Monday) – People & websites that helped me in 2014, thank you message
- 31 December (Wednesday) – Best of Chandoo.org in 2014
- 1 January (Thursday) – Free 2015 Excel calendar & daily planner template
- 5 January (Monday) – Regular broadcasting of Excel awesomeness
Our forum:
Our Excel forum will be up and running during the holiday season. That said, I would not expect quick help for any problems as most of our regular members would be away on holiday break. You have higher chance of getting true for rand()=rand() than finding someone to answer your Excel question during next few days. So be patient and enjoy the holidays.
Online store:
Our online store will be open. Any purchase you make for training programs, templates or eBooks will be delivered as promised. If you join our course on Christmas eve or day or on new year day, please expect to receive your password by the end of next working day. If you have any support query, please expect to hear a resolution by 7th of January.
Emails:
If you are sending me an email, please expect a reply only after 7th of Jan. If you have something urgent to say, you can call me (find my number on the site).
Once again…,
On behalf of my family, our staff, volunteers and well wishers, let me wish you a very pleasant holiday season and an awesome start to 2015.
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...