Via email, I got this kinda perplexing question:
i heard that the new excel doesn’t have pivot tables – why are you keeping macs out of business???
I’m trying to figure out where this came from, and I’m not quite sure. Excel 2008 already had pivot table support (to get started with pivot tables in Excel 2008, check out Create a pivot table report in the Excel help, and there’s a Lynda.com tutorial for it too). My only guess about this confusion is that someone might have misunderstood Walt Mossberg’s review, in which he noted that Office:Mac 2011 doesn’t have all of the features of Office 2010 for Windows, such as pivot charts in Excel.
In Excel:Mac 2011, we made a big investment in improving matters for our power users, which includes some great improvements to pivot tables. If you’re an Excel guru, check it out and tell us what you think. I think that Excel gurus will especially appreciate the performance improvements.
Nadyne,
Can you tell me why, within a Pivot table, it is not possible to sort a given field by the sum value? I can sort sales territories by the names of the sales territories (alphabetically), but the Pivot tables in office for mac 2011 do not enable me to sort by, for example, the value of sales in each of those territories (hightest first, etc.). Office for Windows 2003 enables me to do this.
Thanks.
Honestly, pivot tables are outside my area of expertise. Let me see if I can find someone who can help out.
We don’t have any UI in the report, filter or builder windows for this, which is slightly different than the Excel for Windows implementation. However, select the one of the rows in the column you want to sort by (that contains SUM fields), click the “Data” menu and select “Sort…” This gives you a dialog that lets you pick which column you’d like to sort, order, etc.
Thanks for checking and following up.
Yes, I did figure out this work-around in the last couple of days. The reason that I call it a work-around is two-fold:
1. For sub-rows, this must be done multiple times, once for each sub-row.
2. It is not sticky. Refreshing the data, depending on exactly what changes happened in the data, often causes this sorting to be lost.
Please add this to the list of things to get to.
Thanks,
Tom
I saw your comment elsewhere acknowledging that I’ve now left Microsoft, so I know you know that I won’t be adding this to the list of things to get to. 🙂 That said, even if I were still there, the best way to note that you want this to happen is to submit product feedback. That way, your feedback is aggregated with all of the other feedback, and it’s one of the inputs into the decision-making process.