How to Use Excel 2010 Pivot Tables and Charts – Part 3

Filters are a particularly useful tool in Excel 2010, especially when used with Pivot Tables and Charts. One method of Filtering data is through the use of Groups, elements applied to various rows and columns and which can be created through the Group Selection command. Additionally, Groupings also appear within the Field Lists area and within the Pivot Table as a new row entry.

Filtering is also available through individual buttons assigned to each field, enabling the user to select all field elements or choose individual elements.

The Report Filter zone is another method for filtering in Excel 2010, utilizing the dropzone to Filter data in much the same manner as Groups.

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back. In this section, we’re going to continue looking at Pivot Tables and Charts and we’re going to concentrate in this section on Filters. But before we do that we’ve got a couple of other things to finish off from last time and a couple of potential problem areas really. When we finished the last section, we had just grouped all of the transactions into months, so we’d created groups and we’ve got a Table and Chart showing for six months the sales in three selected branches, totaled value over those months and showing that the Boston branch, generally speaking, has by far the highest sales. Now when we did that we used a facility on the Options tab of Group and we used Group Field and we selected Months as the group. Now, what that would actually do is to look at all of the transactions in our Pivot Table and put together all of the ones that were in each of the months; so, all of the April transactions are in this row. Now that’s not April in any one year, it’s April in all years. Now, in fact, the transactions I used here were over a relatively short period of time, although there were over 30,000 of them, so they were actually in the same year, but that was more by accident than design. And if I really wanted to cover a long period of time and show a chronological sequence, I’d have to change this grouping to be months and years. So I can select two items. And if I do that, watch what happens in the table and the chart. And what you can see is that Excel gives me a year category and within the year category, the months. It also adjusts the chart accordingly.

Now, in fact, we can take the concept of grouping like this one step farther and we can apply it to either rows or columns and we can even create groups of our own, for our own convenience. Now I’ve got data on five branches, three of them are shown at the moment. What I’m going to do is to switch all of the branches on for the moment. So, I’ve got all five there; I’ve got Boston, Chicago, Denver, Miami, and a New York branch. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to choose the Boston, hold the Control key down, select Miami and New York and I’m going to click on Group Selection. Now, that actually creates a group and if you now look down at the chart you’ll see that what it says on the chart is Group 1 – Boston, Group 1 – Miami, Group 1 – NY. If I select Group 1 and then in the Formula Bar I’m going to give it, this is just to demonstrate the principle, I’m going to give it the name of “Eastern” and I’ve now effectively grouped those three branches into what I’ve called my Eastern group. Now, of course, there was nothing about Eastern in the original transactional data. This is a group name that I’ve introduced for my own convenience and, in fact, within Pivot Table and Pivot Chart processing in Excel 2010 there are many opportunities to add concepts and entities of our own to our analysis of the data.

So, next I’m going to choose Chicago and Denver, group those, and I’m going to select that group name, Group 2 and I’m going to call it “Western.” There we are. And now all five of my branches have a prefix name shown here, which is the group followed by the branch name. Now, you will notice on the chart, you can probably just about see it, that I’ve still got a full set of five columns for each of the months in 2010 for which I have transactions. Now watch what happens if I collapse the Eastern groups and next to the Eastern group I have a little minus sign to collapse the group and what is in fact on the chart now shows that all of my Eastern group figures have been combined into a total for Eastern, the Western ones are still separate.

And, of course, I can do the same for Western. I can collapse the Western group down and now I just have in my Composite Bar Chart, I just have two bars, an Eastern Bar and a Western Bar. And in this way I can form any combination of which ever entity it is, in this case branches, but I could do the same with the departments or any other entity that I have in my table and I can do analysis at that grouping level.

Now it’s worth looking at what’s happened in the Field List as a result of doing this. In the upper section, we have two new fields appeared. Obviously these are not fields which we identified at the beginning, but they’re ones we’ve introduced for the purposes of analysis and reporting. We’ve got years and we’ve got Branch 2. If we click on the dropdown against Years, we’ve effectively got a Filter there and in fact all of the transactions are in the year 2010, so that’s not really a big issue in the case of the transactional data I’ve got here. But if I had transaction over a very large number of years I could Filter accordingly here. Branch 2, which is effectively the next level of branch, if I click on that, that lets me Filter on the two introduced groups: Eastern and Western.

And as far as my Pivot Table is concerned, when I introduced these groups they became one row in the table, so they operate at the level of Eastern, where I can collapse or expand and the individual branches come at the next row level down. Similarly, I can expand Western.

And I can, of course, take this one step further because I could select Eastern, hold the Control key down, select Western. Click on Group Selection again and I’m going to name this group U.S.A. and I now have a new level. It’s appeared in my Column Labels. It’s appeared on my Chart. It’s appeared in my Field List and I can, of course, collapse it which gives me a total for U.S.A. sales. And of course if I’ve got an international operation I might be able to then combine nations into continents and so on. So, I have a multi-level grouping facility which can further add to the power of my Pivot Table and Pivot Chart reporting.

Okay, let’s start with the Filters that we can access from the chart itself. Now we’ve all ready got buttons here from which we can filter, so let’s take Date for example. If I click on Date I can do Select All or I could say I just want January and February. Click on OK, there are of course no records in those dates, so let’s try June and July, where, of course, there are records.

Now when ever I’ve applied a Filter, the little Filter sign shows here. There’s also, of course, a Filter here for the year. I only have 2010 values. If I selected less-thans, I wouldn’t find any, more-thans I wouldn’t find any, so it’s only 2010s, so that won’t make any difference. If I look over here for Branch 2, which is basically the group which will be Eastern or Western, I can Filter on that. So, for instance, if I just click there, De-select, and say Eastern, although that grouping is effectively a value that I’ve introduced myself, the Filters still work on it and I only get the Eastern branches. Similarly if I now remove that by doing Select All, you can see the names of the branches – Boston, Miami, NY, Chicago, Denver. On branch I have, clearly, the set of selections here, but I can also use Label or Value Filters. For instance, Label Filter, I could say Begins with and I could say that the Label begins with B. Click on OK and I only get Boston because the branch name begins with a letter B. If I put on a Filter like this there’s a little tick mark here that shows that a Filter is in place. If I want to clear it, I just say Clear Filter.

So apart from being able to use these Filters that are on the chart any way, I also have the equivalent of an earlier Filter facility which is this drop zone here, Report Filter Zone. I can take any of my fields and drop it into the zone. So, if I take the Branch Field, for instance, and drag that into there, this fundamentally changes my report from the point of view of it now only has the group level shown here, although I obviously I can expand it out again. But the Filter now is positioned up here on the top left and is really read as a Filter on the whole report, so it’s going to achieve the same affect, but I can click and choose the branch or branches that I want, including selecting multiple options. So I could say I just want the Boston and Denver and they’re the only two that are included, one being an Eastern and one being in Western. If I remove that Filter, you note the relative sizes of the blues and reds. Remove that Filter by clicking Select All again, click on OK, and they’re back to the values that they were.

So we have several tools to help us with Filtering. We’ve seen most of them now and just going back to the Filters we’ve set so far, if we remove these, for instance, the Date Filter here, Select All again to get all dates back in. We have the Column Labels here, we still have both Eastern and Western included and the only Filter we’ve now got is one on department, but department is not shown. So a quick scan around we can check that nothing else is Filtered and that gets us ready for looking at the major new inclusion in Excel 2010 on the working of Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts which are slices and we’re going to look at slices in the next section. So, I’ll see you then.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!