I thought it would be helpful to show some of the mechanics of programming with pivot tables. One important part of this is referencing the various ranges within a pivot table by their special VBA range names (which are actually properties of the Pivot Table object).

I’ll illustrate these special ranges using this simple pivot table, which comes from an example formerly available on the Microsoft web site (I can no longer locate it).

In VBA, you can reference a pivot table using this code in a procedure:

Dim pt As PivotTable
Set pt = ActiveSheet.PivotTables(1)

I’ve highlighted the various ranges using the indicated VBA commands.

TableRange1

pt.TableRange1.Select

TableRange2

pt.TableRange2.Select

RowRange

pt.RowRange.Select

ColumnRange

pt.ColumnRange.Select

DataLabelRange

pt.DataLabelRange.Select

DataBodyRange

pt.DataBodyRange.Select

PageRange

pt.PageRange.Select

Pivot Field LabelRange

pt.PivotFields("Years").LabelRange.Select

PivotField DataRange

pt.PivotFields("Years").DataRange.Select

Pivot Item LabelRange

pt.PivotFields("Years").PivotItems("2004").LabelRange.Select

Pivot Item DataRange

pt.PivotFields("Years").PivotItems("2004").DataRange.Select

pt.PivotFields("Order Date").PivotItems("Feb").DataRange.Select

Pivot Field LabelRange

The next few examples show the same ranges as above, after pivoting the table’s Years field from the columns area to the rows area.

pt.PivotFields("Years").LabelRange.Select

Pivot Item LabelRange

pt.PivotFields("Years").PivotItems("2004").LabelRange.Select

Pivot Item DataRange

pt.PivotFields("Years").PivotItems("2004").DataRange.Select

Complex Range

If a particular range isn’t specifically defined with a VBA property, you can use VBA range-extending properties EntireColumn and EntireRow and range operators Union and Intersect to define the range. For example:

Intersect(pt.PivotFields("Years").Pivotitems("2004").DataRange.EntireRow, pt.PivotFields("Order Date").DataRange).Select

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Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
 

In Visualization Challenge – How to show market share changes? our colleague Chandoo presented the following data and challenged his readers to display it meaningfully. The data shows market share for two brands and five competing retailers, at two times. The challenge was to show the trends over time. I took on this challenge in Challenge – Show Market Share Changes. While working on this challenge, I realized that the data made for a good example of the power of pivot tables for fast and detailed analysis.

Pivot Table Data

I’ve rearranged Chandoo’s sample data into the form required for an effective pivot table. There are no blank rows or columns, the first row has headers (field names), and there is one row (record) per observation.

Pivot Tables and Charts

To create a pivot table, select all of the data or a single cell within the data (Excel will try to use the contiguous range surrounding the selected cell), and from the Data menu or the Insert tab in 2007, choose Pivot Table. To include a pivot chart, you can choose the appropriate option in the dialogs, or you can select the pivot table and insert a chart, or (and this can be dangerous) you can select an existing chart, edit the source data, click in the Data Range entry box, and click in the pivot table. This last operation is dangerous, because it converts the chart into a pivot chart, and pivot charts cannot be reverted to regular charts. Of course, it is possible to create Regular Charts from Pivot Tables.

The pivot chart is joined to the pivot table at the hip. Any changes to the pivot table are reflected in the pivot chart, and vice versa. For clarity, I have hidden the pivot buttons from these pivot charts. They are redundant since the pivot table and chart are so close together, and they consume valuable chart real estate.

This first arrangement shows each competitor as a different color series. This is fine, but there is too much spacial separation between the two times to allow a good assessment of the trends.

This is easy to fix with a pivot table. You can click and drag the gray field buttons around to change the arrangement instantly. So I dragged the time field inside the product field. The times are closer, but the trends are still not so easy to discern.

Okay, maybe the competitors shouldn’t rank their own series. I dragged the competitor field down to the rows area and the product field up to the columns area. Hmm, the times are again too far apart.

Click, drag. Okay, the times are pretty close now, but the comparison between brands is given more emphasis.

So if we swap the time and product fields, we put the data for the two corresponding time periods next to each other. This view compares the competitors for each brand…

… while this view compares the two brands for each competitor.

The Ultimate Chart

This analysis gave me just enough insight to know how I should build the chart I answered Chandoo’s challenge with. It was not a pivot chart, nor was it based directly on a pivot table, but it utilized the insights from the analysis above. I created a panel chart with each competitor in its own vertical panel, and with lines connecting the data.

I’ll show the particular data arrangement and protocol I used to create this chart in an upcoming post. Stay tuned.

More About Pivot Tables

For more about pivot tables, check out these web pages, mostly from my site:

• Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts (on the PTS web site)
  Originally contributed by fellow Excel MVP Debra Dalgleish.
  Check out Debra’s Excel Tips page and Pivot Table and Pivot Chart FAQs.
  – Introduction to Pivot Tables in Excel
  – Working with Pivot Charts in Excel
  – Pivot Table Programming
  – Pivot Table and Pivot Chart Links
• Pivot Tables (related posts on this blog)
• Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts, and Real Charts (TechTrax Article)
• Books on Excel Pivot Tables
  – Excel Pivot Tables Recipe Book: A Problem-Solution Approach by Debra Dalgleish
  – Beginning PivotTables in Excel 2007: From Novice to Professional by Debra Dalgleish
  – Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 by Bill Jelen and Michael Alexander

In a moment I’ll show how to make a regular chart from a pivot table’s data. But first let’s review some of the strengths and weaknesses of pivot charts.

Pivot charts have some advantages over regular charts:

• Pivot charts are dynamic
• Pivot charts are interactive
• Pivot charts can be pivoted

However, the same infrastructure that conveys these advantages also results in some shortcomings:

• Some chart types (XY) are not available to pivot charts
• The date scale axis is not available in pivot charts
• All data from the pivot table must be included in the pivot chart
• Data from outside the pivot table cannot be included in the pivot chart
• Pivot chart formatting options are limited
• Pivot chart formatting may be lost when the pivot table is changed

Microsoft hosts a number of decent Pivot Table examples. I will use one of them for this tutorial. Go to the Microsoft example 25 easy PivotTable reports, which has a link to Excel 2002 Sample: PivotTable Reports. From this page you can download a self-extracting executable named Reports.exe, which contains four workbooks. The top few records of the Source Data worksheet of the SampleSalespersonReports.xls workbook looks like this:

To create a pivot table, select one cell within this data range, and choose Pivot Table and Pivot Chart Report from the Data menu. To keep things uncomplicated, place the pivot table onto a new worksheet. Drag the Order Date field to the rows area, the Country field to the Columns area, and the Order Amount field to the Data area. Group the Order Date field by month and year as described in Grouping by Date in a Pivot Table. The resulting pivot table looks like this:

To make a pivot chart, select any part of the pivot table and insert a chart. In Excel 2003 and earlier, by default the pivot table is created on its own chart sheet. I always move the pivot chart to the same worksheet as the pivot table, so I select a blank cell that isn’t touching the pivot table, and insert a chart without specifying any data. I then select the chart, invoke the Source Data command, and click in the pivot table, which instantly turns the chart into a pivot chart associated permanently with this pivot table.

The pivot chart is linked to the pivot table, so any changes to the pivot table are reflected in the chart. In fact, the same dragging around of field buttons to pivot the table can also be accomplished in the chart, and the pivot table keeps up. A regular chart is not dynamic in this way. You could write VBA procedures that detect a pivot table change and adjust the chart’s series data accordingly, but that’s probably beyond the scope of any blog post.

However, a pivot chart doesn’t let you add data from outside the pivot table. You cannot change the size of the plot area or the position of the legend, chart title, or axis titles (other than deleting them). So you decide you want a regular chart.

Making a regular chart is actually easier than you think, as long as you are careful about setting the chart series data. You cannot set the overall source data range for the chart. You have to start with a blank chart, and add your data one series at a time.

Here is the protocol for creating a regular chart similar to the pivot chart above, using the pivot table’s data.

1. Select a blank cell which is not touching the pivot table.
2. Insert a chart. In Excel 2003, select a chart type in step 1 of the Chart Wizard, and click Finish. In Excel 2007, simply select a chart type.
3. Right click the chart, choose Source Data or Select Data. In Excel 2003, click on the Series tab.
4. Click the Add button to add a new series.
5. Click in the Series Name box, and then select the cell with the series name (e.g., the country label UK).
6. Click in the Values, Y Values, or Series Values box, then select the range containing the Y values (the Order Amount data under the UK label(.
7. In Excel 2003, click in the Category (X) Axis Labels or X Values box, then select the range containing the category labels; In Excel 2007, click Edit under Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels, then select the range containing these labels. In both cases, this is the two-column range between the Years and Order Date field buttons at the top and the Grand Total label at the bottom.
8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 as required for all series, including data inside and outside the pivot table.

If I have other data for a country not included in the pivot table, I can simply add it to a regular chart per the protocol above. A pivot chart allows no outside data.

If I want an XY chart, I can create a regular XY chart using the protocol above. A pivot chart cannot use the XY chart type, not can it use a date-scale axis in a line chart.

In a pivot table, you can group dates by various measures ranging from seconds to years, to get a clearer view of the data. Plotting by month will smooth out the noise of a daily plot.

You can combine groupings, for example, to compare monthly sales by year.

These plots are regular charts which use pivot table data as their source. This technique will be covered in a (near) future post. The charts below are the corresponding pivot charts.

Microsoft hosts a number of decent Pivot Table examples. I will use one of them for this tutorial. Go to the Microsoft example 25 easy PivotTable reports, which has a link to Excel 2002 Sample: PivotTable Reports. From this page you can download a self-extracting executable named Reports.exe, which contains four workbooks. The top few records of the Source Data worksheet of the SampleSalespersonReports.xls workbook looks like this:

To create a pivot table, select one cell within this data range, and choose Pivot Table and Pivot Chart Report from the Data menu. To keep things uncomplicated, place the pivot table onto a new worksheet. Drag the Order Date field to the rows area and the Order Amount field to the Data area. The top few rows of the pivot table looks like this:

Click in this pivot table and click the chart wizard button. The resulting pivot chart looks like this when it is relocated to the worksheet:

To group the dates, right click anywhere in the date field range, choose Group and Show Detail, then choose Group.

To group by any time period, select that period in the dialog. To group by weeks, select Days, and change Number of Days to 7. To group by month, choose Months; note that this grouping will combine data for each month regardless of year. In this example, group by both Months and Years.

The Order Date column of the pivot table is split into a Years and a Months column.

With the new grouping of months and years, the pivot chart changes to plot months and years along the category axis.

Click on the Years field button, and drag it to the columns area, where the Total label is located. This splits the data into three yearly columns, each showing monthly totals for the respective year.

The pivot chart now shows one series of monthly sales for each year.

The dynamic nature of this pivot chart illustrates one of the benefits of pivot charts: the chart continues to display the data no matter how the table is pivoted. This makes pivot charts indispensable during the early stages of data exploration. The pivot chart’s relative inflexibility when it comes to formatting and handling of arbitrary (non-pivot-related) data, make pivot charts a liability during later stages of data presentation.

In an upcoming blog entry, I’ll describe how to create regular charts like those in the beginning of this article using data from a pivot table.

For more about pivot tables, check out these pages on my web site:

• Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts
      Contributed by fellow Excel MVP Debra Dalgleish. Check out Debra’s Excel Tips page
      – Introduction to Pivot Tables in Excel
      – Working with Pivot Charts in Excel
      – Pivot Table Programming
      – Pivot Table and Pivot Chart Links
• Pivot Tables, Pivot Charts, and Real Charts (TechTrax Article)
• Books on Excel Pivot Tables
      – Excel Pivot Tables Recipe Book: A Problem-Solution Approach by Debra Dalgleish
      – Beginning PivotTables in Excel 2007: From Novice to Professional by Debra Dalgleish
      – Pivot Table Data Crunching by Bill Jelen and Michael Alexander
      – Pivot Table Data Crunching for Microsoft Office Excel 2007 by Bill Jelen and Michael Alexander
   

A pareto chart is a column or bar chart that lists items in decreasing order of their occurrence. A pareto chart may include a line chart series showing the cumulative occurrence of the items. The left-most items are most prevalent, so if your pareto chart shows instances of failure modes, you start fixing the left-most failure modes first.

Here is my data table. The main category data from the first column is duplicated in the second for reasons which will become clear when you try to use the category in two places in the pivot table.

Select the data and insert a pivot table. Put the Main Category and Sub Category fields into the rows area, the Category field into the columns area, and the Defects field (Sum of Defects) into the data area.

This data arrangement looks very much like what I set up manually in the last post. Now you can either make a pivot chart from the data:

which is somewhat inflexible in its formatting. I personally would like to remove some of the white space all around the chart and delete the legend. You can clean it up somewhat by hiding the pivot chart field buttons:

I still like to make a regular chart from my pivot data, as long as the pivot table isn’t going to change its shape too much. To do this, you have to select a blank cell distant from the pivot table when you insert the chart. Then you need to add each series individually and select its data, in Classic Excel either in step 2 of the Chart Wizard or in the Source Data dialog (use the Series tab in both cases), or in Excel 2007 using the Select Data command.

The advantage of the regular chart is that you have full control over all formatting, and over the data used in the chart. The disadvantage is that if the pivot data changes and the pivot table is refreshed or repivoted, the pivot table may cover a different range, and the chart will plot the original range. If the data changes a lot, you will have to (a) update the chart source data links manually, (b) design some clever dynamic range definitions so the links automatically keep pointing to the correct range, or (c) write a VBA procedure to update the chart’s links. This last option is pretty tricky to set up, but saves lots of time and frustration in the long run.

Second in a series

• Chart with a Dual Category Axis
• Using Pivot Table Data for a Chart with a Dual Category Axis
• Dynamic Chart using Pivot Table and Range Names
• Dynamic Chart using Pivot Table and VBA