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PivotTable

Import and Clean Bank Activity

By Jeff Lenning | February 15, 2018 |

If you have ever downloaded bank activity from your bank’s website, you know there is some amount of cleaning you need to do before the data is ready to use. Perhaps the next step is to summarize the bank activity with a PivotTable, or, perhaps to perform a bank rec. Regardless of your ultimate objective,…

One-Click Data Model Date Table

By Jeff Lenning | January 31, 2018 |

Using the Data Model (or Power Pivot) helps us build some amazing PivotTables. A date table (or calendar table) is integral to most data models as they allow us to group reports by various date periods and use a wide variety of time intelligence functions. Although there are many ways to build such a date…

Get & Transform: An Alternative to Simple PivotTable Reports

By Jeff Lenning | September 27, 2017 |

I love PivotTables, and use them all the time. But, when our needs are simple, we can easily summarize data with a Get & Transform query instead. Why? To simplify our workbooks and improve our efficiency. Let me demonstrate. Objective Before we dig into the mechanics, let’s just be clear about our goal. Let’s say…

Most Recent Transaction Date

By Jeff Lenning | March 9, 2017 |

I recently received a question about how to find the most recent transaction date of a list of items. There are a few fun ways to accomplish this, and so I thought I’d walk through three options. Thanks Darrell for your question! Objective The exact question from Darrell is: “I have a data table of…

Daily Bank Balance with a PivotTable

By Jeff Lenning | October 20, 2016 |

When you download banking activity, you typically get the transactions, but not the daily bank balance. To compute the daily bank balance, you need to summarize the transactions by day and display a running total for all days, even those without any activity. This post demonstrates how to build such a report using a PivotTable. Overview…

Macro to Quickly Format PivotTable Values

By Jeff Lenning | February 4, 2016 |

PivotTable users frequently spend time assigning the same number format to PivotTable values. To my knowledge, there isn’t a built-in setting that allows us to define a default value field format. But, it is pretty easy to set up a macro that instantly assigns a desired format. This post walks through the steps of creating such a macro. Objective…

Show PivotTable Months without Data

By Jeff Lenning | September 3, 2015 |

If you have ever created a PivotTable report that groups by month, you may have encountered an awkward situation where the PivotTable only displays the months that actually have data in the source. The PivotTable will summarize the data that exists and if there are no transactions for a given month, the PivotTable won’t display it.…

PivotTable Month Groups Article

By Jeff Lenning | May 7, 2015 |

Did you know that PivotTables can automatically group date fields by month? And by quarter and year? This date group capability makes it easy to summarize data in monthly columns without writing a single formula. Check out my recent California CPA Magazine article for the details. Publication: California CPA Magazine Author: Jeff Lenning CPA Date: May 2015…

Histogram with a PivotChart

By Jeff Lenning | March 26, 2015 |

A histogram graphically displays the number of items that fall within equal intervals, or, bins. For example, the number of days with a high temperature between 71-80 degrees, 81-90, and 91-100, the number of students with test scores between 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, or the number of invoices that are due in 31-60, 61-90, or 91-120…

PivotTable Report Group Formatting

By Jeff Lenning | January 14, 2015 |

In this post, we’ll check out a few PivotTable formatting techniques that help get our report looking just right. Objective Our objective is to create the following PivotTable report. There are a few formatting points to note about the report. First, the region groups, such as Midwest and Northeast, are in the same column as the…