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Pivot Table Tip: Color All One Type of Data Items at Once

Märt Parker — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:12:05 +0000

Microsoft Excel’s styling capabilities have improved over the time. But there are still lackings on some areas. One thing I personally miss is the ability to attach styles to Pivot table items. For example you have in one table the sums of revenues and sums of quantities – and you wish the revenues to be formatted differently. Of course, you can manually change the formatting of each revenue cell, but this is not a very modern way to handle it – considering we use styles for such formatting tasks in MS Office and other programs nowadays.

I have a little tip for those of you who face the same problem – you can still attach different color to different Pivot table items. It is possible to use custom formatting to define the color of the Pivot table data item. This way all data of the same kind will be formatted with the same font color – resistant to table refreshes, size changes and field arrangements. And most importantly – you can change the color instantly from one place.

Field format is applied by right-clicking on the field name: Field settings -> Number

Then you should apply ‘Custom’ number formatting and define color format as shown on the screenshot below. This makes the text blue:

Below is a table of milk production data. One data item is made blue to distinguish it from the rest of the table:

Small Excel Chart Inside the Cell

Märt Parker — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:30:21 +0000

Here is one tip for improving the readability of larger data tables – use in-cell graphics. This is based on using ordinary characters as graphic elements. It is possible to repeat the characters using Excel REPT() function.

Below is a statistical table from Eurostat that is tuned with in-cell graphics.

Tip 1: You can apply calculations to second parameter to fit the result into desired space (in this case, the numerical value is divided by 10)

Tip 2: Try experimenting with different characters for the repetition, like “-”, “o” as the first parameter for the function. You can also apply some other character at the end of the formula with “&”+[end character]

Tip 3: Changing fonts and font sizes of the cell can result in creative outcomes

Excel in-cell graphics for improved readability

Excel Sparklines Charts Help to Display Quantitative Information

Märt Parker — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 19:33:39 +0000

Excel has built-in data tables and charts. There are situations when you have a large nicely formatted table and you just need to add there little diagrams to envision the trend. Regular charts are too uncomfortable to use, because you would have to give up all the formatting of the excisting data table and create everything anew in the chart. The solution is to use sparklines charts.

So what’s a sparkline? It’s a tiny graphic near the table column or row that helps the reader to grasp the meaning of the numbers quickly.

Sparklines chart

How to make sparkline charts in Excel? This is not a standard Excel functionality, but you can use an Excel add-in. Those are actually macros which create an Excel chart without all the unnecessary attributes (axes, units etc.)

Here is the list of add-in’s from the internet:

TinyGraphs – a free add-in, which can be used to make graphs for a row of data. Open-source macro and installable add-in both available.

http://www.spreadsheetml.com/products.html

SparkMaker – it is not free, but has a free trial. Possibility to make sparklines in Excel, PowerPoint, Word.

http://www.bissantz.com/sparkmaker/index_en.asp

MicroCharts – commercial software