Pivot tables are great help when analyzing lots of data. One of the common questions managers & analysts ask (when looking at monthly sales data for example) is,
How is the monthly performance of our teams (or regions, products etc.)?
A pivot report can answer this question in a snap.
But the answer is incomplete!
Why? Because, we don’t want sum of sales by month & sales person alone. We want to know their performance! Something like below:
Performance eh?!? How to measure it?
There are many ways to measure performance. For our monthly sales data, we can measure performance by comparing,
- Sales with targets
- This month value with previous month value
- This month value with same month last year value
- One person’s sale with rest of team etc.
One of the most common ways to measure performance in situations like this is to see how this months value has changed compared to previous month.
How to show monthly values & % changes in pivot?
Do you know that with just a few clicks, we can add % changes to our pivot? Follow these steps:
1. Create a pivot report with months & sales persons (or months & products, months & regions etc.)
2. Add Net sales (or any other metric) to value field area of pivot report
3. Now, add net sales once again to value field area
That is right. You can add same metric more than once to pivot table value field area.
At this point, our report looks like this:
4. Right click on 2nd value and choose value field settings.
5. Click on Show values as tab and follow below steps. (see image aside)
- Choose “% Difference from” from the drop down
- Select Month as base field
- Select (previous) as base item
- Click ok
This will show % changes with respect to previous month in the pivot report!
Extending this to make it even more awesome
1. Clean up the titles
Change the titles to Sales & % change. To do this, just select the first column title and type over. Repeat for 2nd column.
2. Add conditional formatting
Select any cell in the % change column. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > New rule
[Resource: Introduction to Excel Conditional Formatting, more]
Specify the rule as mentioned in below illustration.
3. Show just icons
We can go one more step and show just icons. Since pivot tables show tool tips on hover, we can easily find % change for any month / sales person by just pointing on that cell.
Finalized monthly report
Our final report looks like this:
Download Example Pivot Report
Click here to download this example pivot report. Examine various settings & conditional formats to learn this better.
How do you use value field calculations in Pivot reports?
Although most of my pivots use simple sum or count type of summaries, often I use custom calculations like % difference from, running total , % of row etc. to understand the data better. These are very simple to setup yet give powerful insights.
What about you? Do you use value field settings to modify your pivot reports? What other summary techniques you use? Please share your tips, ideas using comments.
More on Pivot Tables
Along with formulas, Pivot tables are best friends of Excel analysts. They can take massive amounts of data, process and summarize in just a few clicks. To learn more about them, use below resources.
13 Responses to “Using pivot tables to find out non performing customers”
To avoid the helper column and the macro, I would transpose the data into the format shown above (Name, Year, Sales). Now I can show more than one year, I can summarize - I can do many more things with it. ASAP Utilities (http://www.asap-utilities.com) has a new experimental feature that can easily transpose the table into the correct format. Much easier in my opinion.
David
Of course with alternative data structure, we can easily setup a slicer based solution so that everything works like clockwork with even less work.
David, I was just about to post the same!
In Contextures site, I remember there's a post on how to do that. Clearly, the way data is layed out on the very beginning is critical to get the best results, and even you may thinkg the original layout is the best way, it is clearly not. And that kind of mistakes are the ones I love ! because it teaches and trains you to avoid them, and how to think on the data structure the next time.
Eventually, you get to that place when you "see" the structure on the moment the client tells you the request, and then, you realized you had an ephiphany, that glorious moment when data is no longer a mistery to you!!!
Rgds,
Chandoo,
If the goal is to see the list of customers who have not business from yearX, I would change the helper column formula to :
=IF(selYear="all",sum(C4:M4),sum(offset(C4:M4,,selyear-2002,1,columns(C4:M4)-selyear+2002)))This formula will sum the sales from Selected Year to 2012.
JMarc
If you are already using a helper column and the combox box runs a macro after it changes, why not just adjust the macro and filter the source data?
Regards
I gotta say, it seems like you are giving 10 answers to 10 questions when your client REALLY wants to know is: "What is the last year "this" customer row had a non-zero Sales QTY?... You're missing the forest for the trees...
Change the helper column to:
=IFERROR(INDEX(tblSales[[#Headers],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],0,MATCH(9.99999999999999E+307,tblSales[[#This Row],[Customer name]:[Sales 2012]],1)),"NO SALES")
And yes, since I'm matching off of them for value, I would change the headers to straight "2002" instead of "Sales 2002" but you sort the table on the helper column and then and there you can answer all of your questions.
Hi thanks for this. Just can't figure out how you get the combo box to control the pivot table. Can you please advise?
Cheers
@Kevin.. You are welcome. To insert a combo box, go to Developer ribbon > Insert > form controls > combo box.
For more on various form controls and how to use them, please read this: http://chandoo.org/wp/2011/03/30/form-controls/
Thanks Chandoo. But I know how to insert a combobox, I was more referring to how does in control the year in the pivot table? Or is this obvious? I note that if I select the Selected Year from the PivotTable Field List it says "the field has no itens" whereas this would normally allow you to change the year??
Thanks again
worked it out thanks...
when =data!Q2 changes it changes the value in column N:N and then when you do a refreshall the pivottable vlaues get updated
Still not sure why PivotTable Field List says “the field has no itens"?? I created my own pivot table and could not repeat that.
Hi, I put the sales data in range(F5:P19) and added a column D with the title 'Last sales in year'. After that, in column D for each customer, the simple formula
=2000+MATCH(1000000,E5:P5)
will provide the last year in which that particular customer had any sales, which can than easily be managed by autofilter.
Somewhat longer but perhaps a bit more solid (with the column titles in row 4):
=RIGHT(INDEX($F$4:$P$19,1,MATCH(1000000,F5:P5)),4)
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