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Building an Excel PivotTable Building an Excel PivotTable for Your Institutional for Your Institutional

Research WebsiteResearch Website(or Excel PivotTables and (or Excel PivotTables and PivotChartsPivotCharts 101.5)101.5)

October 2005

OBJECTIVES♦ Develop parent datasource sheet

♦ Create PivotTable reportusing Excel Wizard

♦ Protecting parent sourcedata

♦ Modifying PivotTablereports

♦ Creating multiplePivotTable reports using onesource data file

♦ Designing PivotCharts

♦ Saving PivotTables andPivotCharts file to web

Introduction

Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts is anexcellent tool to create, manipulate andpresent data. Indepth coverage of tables andcharts, as well as posting the completedproject to a web site can be very beneficial foryour department in providing vastinformation. This presentation will introduceyou to the basics of designing and creating auseful and productive PivotTable for your IRwebsite.

Presenters:Kathy Huffman

kathy@ir.msstate.eduand

Elaine Turnereturner@ir.msstate.edu

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Make Your Data Work for You

Do you have more data than you know what to do with? Do you want to seetrends and patterns at a glance? How about providing others the freedom ofmanipulating your data in a way that suits their individual needs? ThenPivotTable reports are for you.

Learn about the little-known, yet powerful, Microsoft Excel PivotTable feature,which organizes, summarizes, and analyzes your data to reveal its meanings. Seewhy the PivotTable feature is so useful and make sense out of data by creating aPivotTable report with charts to better explain your data results. Place yourcreated PivotTable reports and charts onto your website for others to view.

After you’ve created a PivotTable, share your accomplishments with others in yourfield of interest and the general public by placing your completed report ontoyour department website. Not only is this a powerful information source, it willbenefit you and your co-workers greatly by alleviating a majority of the ad-hocand often repetitive data requests which can be so time consuming.

PivotTable reports offer comparisons, reveal patterns and relationships, andanalyze trends. They compare, they reveal, they analyze, by displaying differentviews of data, turning data into information that makes sense. Each PivotTablereport gives you a different view of your data, answering your questions on thespot, and is customized to your purposes.

PivotTable reports do so much to make data manageable. Move the data aroundagain and again, to get as many clear answers as you have questions. There are somany things you can do with PivotTable reports, including formatting, re-usingthe data, and making it interactive in a Web browser.

By placing the data file onto your website, inquirers are allowed the freedom tomanipulate the data as they please. Using the “save as” feature, their final versionof the data may be saved on their personal computer for future use. All this, andyet the parent source data remains untouched and unchanged by anyone but you!

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Start with Raw Data

♦ Check your source data to ensure that it’s correctly organized forgood PivotTablereport results. Replace any special coding with actual text data.

♦ If necessary, change the order in which items are sorted.

♦ Decide which data you want to put in row, column, or page areas on the reportlayout.

♦ Update the PivotTable report whenever the source data is revised by simply re-freshing the links.

♦ Share your completed PivotTable reports and/or charts by putting them on your IRwebsite for others to view and benefit from!

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Source Data for PivotTable ReportsEnrollment Fall 2004 data was used to create the reports in this pivot workbook.If you scan through this source data, you’ll notice that it’s difficult to see thetrends, even if you sort or filter the data, there are just too many records to analyzeat a glance.

Excel can retrieve much larger amounts of data than this, and PivotTable reportsare one of the best Excel tools for extracting the significance from a large, detaileddata set.

The data is organized in list format, similar to how a query returns databaserecords: each column contains similar data, the columns have headings in the firstrow, and the list isn’t interrupted by any blank rows or columns (although blankcells within the data are OK).

The first row of your source data must have a heading for each column. Allempty rows or columns within the range of data to be used for the report must beremoved. Remember, each column should contain only one kind of data.Because Excel automatically creates subtotals and grand totals in a PivotTablereport, you must remove any subtotals or grand totals from the source data beforecreating the report.

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Designing Your ReportThe wizard presents you with a new worksheet area that contains everything youneed to lay out a PivotTable view of your data: The PivotTable Field List and alayout area.

The Row Fields area displays data vertically, one item per row. The ColumnFields area displays data horizontally, one item in each column.

The PivotTable wizard will walk you through the process of creating an initialPivotTable.

While there are many advanced options available to use, in this example, we willsimply click the Finish Button to create a quick PivotTable.

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Auto FormattingA major step in mastering PivotTables is to understand how the automaticformatting controls can make data clean-up a snap. Simply pull down theFormat menu and select AutoFormat.

Excel provides an assortment of formats to choose from. Simply choose aformat, and your data is now more readable.

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Modifying Reports

Create multiple reports and charts using only one parent data source sheet.Generate reports of various levels of information simply by selecting only a fewor many fields within the source data.

Using the PivotTable field dialog box you can modify reports to displaydifferent results such as averages, counts, minimums, maximums, percentagesand more.

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Creating A PivotChart

The chart on the Chart sheet is a PivotChart report that provides a graphicalrepresentation of the summarized data used in the PivotTable reports in thisworkbook. A PivotChart report has many features similar to a PivotTablereport: you can change the layout, sort, filter, and group the data.

To create a PivotChart report, run the PivotTable and PivotChart Reportwizard, in step 1 select PivotChart (with PivotTable), and then complete thesteps of the wizard as you would for a PivotTable report. Or, if you alreadyhave a PivotTable report that you want to chart, click the report and then clickthe Chart Wizard button on the PivotTable toolbar.

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PivotChart Report on the Chart Sheet

A PivotChart report always has a dependency on a PivotTable report thatprovides the data to be charted, called the associated PivotTable report. Whenyou make changes to a PivotChart report, its associated PivotTable reportreflects the changes.

A new PivotChart report always appears on a separate chart sheet, becausePivotChart reports tend to include lots of data and therefore usually needplenty of space. You can easily move a PivotChart report onto a worksheet, forexample to put it on the same worksheet as its associated PivotTable report.Just click the chart and click Location on the Chart menu.

You can use most of the chart type, formatting, and options available forregular charts to customize a PivotChart report. For more information, ask theExcel Answer Wizard about PivotChart reports.

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Web PivotTable

Now that you have mastered the PivotTable creations, why not share them with othersvia your website?

After creating PivotTable reports, save the data source sheet to another location andplace only the PivotTable file on the web. Remember this step to protect your sourcefile, yet allow inquirers to manipulate the actual PivotTable itself. Saving your file as a“Read Only” or placing a protection on the file blocks the user from being able tomanipulate the table by dragging and dropping selected fields. To keep this veryimportant advantage available for your viewers, save your source file in anotherlocation. The web file will always be linked to your parent source file. Also, if youshould change data within the parent source file a simple refresh or “F8” will updatethe PivotTable file, too.

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Excel Tools

PivotTables not only work well publishing to the Web, they work well inconjunction with other Excel tools including Subtotaling, AutoFilters, sendinge-mail, printing multiple worksheets with one command, grouping, outlining,and copy and paste linking to Micorsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint.

PivotTables just might be the single most powerful tool in Excel for financialreporting, budgeting, and data analysis. On a scale of easy to difficult,learning and mastering PivotTables leans more towards the difficult side of thescale for many users. Perserverance and the use of your own data will be mosthelpful in mastering this area. Once you’ve created many PivotTables andPivotcharts, be sure to keep your techniques a secret--you don’t want anyone inyour office to realize just how much Excel does for you--allow them to thinkthat you are a genius! Invest some time and give PivotTables and honest try.

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