Sunday, April 14, 2013

Grouping data of a text field in a pivot table using group option

Purpose:
How many time in our daily professional life we come to a situation where we want to further summarize the data/reports given by a pivot table? For e.g. Grouping all south locations in sales pivot, grouping designations in headcount summary etc


Steps:
One easy method of doing this could be to add column in your data and update it with required details for grouping. However, it is very tedious to add columns every time.  Also it will increase number of columns in your data and make your database bigger.

You can use group option in pivot table to achieve the same results without adding any extra columns in your data. Just follow few steps mentioned below...
  1. Select the items in the pivot
  2. Right click inside pivot table
  3. Click group
  4. This will group selected data in pivot and give default name like Group 1, group 2 etc.
  5. Change the group name

Steps




Simple...isn't it?

How to remove grouping:
Once you apply grouping on any field, excel pivot automatically adds one more field with the similar name as the filed in which the grouping is applied.

You can remove this grouping by simply dragging this field out of pivot table. This will remove this groping from the pivot table, however it will remain in the pivot field list. You can use the same in future if required.





To delete this field from the field permanently. Right click on the field which is grouped and click group. It will remove the additional grouped field.





Additional note:
Group option gives lot of additional features to group numerical or date fields e.g. grouping date fields into months and years etc. Simply right click on date or numeric field and you can explore more options.

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