If your reports include hourly distribution of data like,
- Customer footfalls in your store
- Page views of your site
- Customer service calls to your toll free numbers
here is an interesting charting idea to show the data around the clock (literally)
Update: Visualization pros Jon Peltier and Jorge Camoes took a critical look at this, nearly fainted 😉 at the carnage of a familiar metaphor and posted their awesome reviews here:
Rock around the clock by Jon, he recommends a line chart over this for all the valid reasons
Charting around clock by Jorge, he suggests a neat looking 12 pointed radar chart as an alternative.
Both these are indeed fine examples of how shaking a familiar metaphor (analog clock) or way doing (usual bar chart for 24 hours) can bring a great discussion and excellent alternatives out of passionate people. Do read them 🙂
What you are seeing is essentially 2 bubble charts tweaked to look like wall-clocks with bubbles around the 12 positions.
This can be an interesting addition to your dashboards or daily report. Excited to find out how this is done? read on.
1. Get your data ready to plot it around the clock (circle)
Let us build the above graph using fictitious page view data for each of the 12 hours since midnight till noon. The data is shown aside.
In order to create the around the clock affect we need to plot each of these hourly values around a circle at 12 points. Now, without getting all mathematicky to scare you, lets try to come up with simple explanation to find all the 12 points around the circle:
Assuming the radius of clock or our chart circle is 100,
- Clock has 12 hour positions, thus each one is 30° (360°/12)
- The first point’s x value would be:
SIN(30°)*100 - and y value would be:
COS(30°)*100 - For each of the other 11 points, we just need to use the multiples of 30: 60, 90, 120, .., 360
- in excel spreadsheet you can find the values by
ROUND(SIN(RADIANS(hour*30))*100,0), ROUND(COS(RADIANS(hour*30))*100,0) - We have to convert the degrees to radians since SIN(), COS() accept only radians as inputs
Once we are done, the data should look like this:
2. Plot the Bubble Chart
This is the easy part, just select the cells containing x,y and page view values and insert new chart, select bubble as the chart type. Make sure you have mentioned the x,y, and bubble sizes in correct places.
The fun part begins after creating the chart, as the dimensions may be skewed and you may get egg like circle, so adjust the dimensions and your 12 hour clock view is ready to go.
Use the same process to create another clock for hours from noon till midnight and juxtapose them on that dashboard or report, send it across to your boss or team, let the conversation begin 😀
Download the template and play with it
Like this technique, why don’t you download the Data Around Clock – Charting Idea excel and play with it. Its available on the standard PAHF license (Poke Around, Have Fun)
Fun ways to enhance these charts:
- Overlay a clock diagram in the background
- Use sky color for the background, thus one clock has darker shades and other has brighter shades
- Bubbles themselves can be colored as Sun colors, bright orange to yellow and back to orange
More on Bubble Charts: Why you should star retirement savings really early, Olympic Medals per Country in All Years
More on charting: Hack together a thermometer chart, tell a story with min-max charts, 73 awesome chart templates, download and wow
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.