In a post I wrote last week, I demonstrated in a video how to use advanced filters (one of Excel’s best-kept secrets) to divide a list of keywords into categories. I promised a commenter I would create a follow-up video demonstrating how I took those data sets and created a pivot chart that updated when you choose a new category.
Pivot charts created in Microsoft Excel can be more useful than ordinary charts, because they are more easily manipulated to show different information and summarizations. Learning to create a pivot chart can be confusing and there are a few decisions you need to make before you begin. By Geetesh Bajaj, James Gordon. In Excel 2011 for mac, a PivotTable is a special kind of table that summarizes data from a table, data range, or database external to the workbook.If you’re PivotTable aficionado, you will be in seventh heaven with the new PivotTable capabilities in Office 2011 for Mac.
Download Excel File
If you’d like to download the Excel file I used, you can access it here. Feel free to kick it around and test out some of the filters I demonstrate in the video.
- Drag fields to the Rows and Columns of the pivot table. Start building the pivot table; To add the text to the values area, you have to create a new special kind of calculated field called a Measure. Look at the top of the Pivot Table Fields list for the table name. Right-click the table name and choose Add Measure.
- Select Insert PivotTable. Under Choose the data that you want to analyze, select Select a table or range. In Table/Range, verify the cell range.
Caveat
Much to my chagrin, pivot charts are PC swim only. You can’t create a pivot chart in Excel 2011 for Mac. (Boo hiss!!!) But not only can you not create one, you can’t even use a report filter on the Mac. You can see this epic fail in action here.But if you’re creating a pivot chart, and there’s the chance that anyone might have to access it from a Mac, you cannot use report filters.
I created a really cool pivot chart for Loren Baker to show a client once, but he was using a Mac and couldn’t use the report filter drop-down. He was in a hurry and asked me to just create screenshots of each of the charts, and he showed those to the client instead. I’ve never quite forgiven Microsoft for that. :/ (Yes, I take making data sexy very seriously. And don’t see the light of day much.)
Video Tutorial
I created a video demonstrating how to take the data spawned from the advanced filters. And even though I said I wasn’t going to get into chart formatting since I’ve covered that in this post from my SMX Advanced presentation and this Search Engine Land post, I did anyway. Because it’s a compulsion. Have you ever tried to control a compulsion? Not. Easy.
Anyway, check it out.
How To Change Dashes To Zeros
How To Combine Two Pivot Tables
As I mention in the video, I really don’t like how Excel formats zeros as dashes in charts. But you can see a quick tutorial on how to change those dashes to zeros or check out my more comprehensive post on number formatting on the Search Engine Land site.
Excel Pivot Table Training Pdf
Learn More
You can learn more about data formatting in my Annielytics Dashboard Course, a video course that will teach you how to put your data in stilettos and work the pole. 🙂
