I apologize for the lack of Musings on Thursday and Friday last week.  Due to work and other commitments, I have decided to put Musings on Hold until Dec. 1.  Please check back then for more tips and tricks, including many more on pivot tables and charting.

Thank you for continuing to read these musings over the last 7 months – I look forward to seeing you again in a few weeks!

Mariana

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could hit the Refresh button, have your pivot table update the result and then have that result automatically appear in the cell where you need it?  Occasionally, you might be able to get away with simply referring to the cell your total appears in, for example, by creating the formula:  =C19 to refer to the Grand Total shown below.  However, if you’ve got a pivot table like the one below, then each month when you refresh the information your total will move down a row…and then, really, what’s the point?  You’ve always got to go in and change the reference anyway, so you might as well hard-code the number!

Now, the above pivot table is already set up to be its own report, but let’s say we want to pull the Grand Total result into a different report as well.  Once we know where we want to pull the total in, all we need to do is hit the equals key (i.e., =) on our keyboard to start the formula, switch to the tab that has our pivot table, and click on the cell that has our total.  This will cause a GETPIVOTDATA formula to appear in our cell.  If we hit the Enter key, we should immediately see the result of 3,635,000 in that cell, as shown below.

Notice that the formula appears in the formula bar above our sheet (indicated by the red box).  Your formula should look something like this, but we’ll get into more of the details in the next few days about how the GETPIVOTDATA formula is set up.  Regardless, if we were to change any of the source data that pulls into our pivot table on the other sheet, we could then Refresh the pivot table and the value in B6 on this sheet above would change at the same time.  Very handy for on-going monthly reporting and analysis, wouldn’t you agree?

You will notice that some of the templates available for download are provided by Microsoft Corporation, as indicated in the top right of the screen.  However, there are other templates that have been created and uploaded by everyday users, who wanted to share the benefits of their template with the world.  Either way, there are lots of great templates in this library and you may find one that is useful for your purpose.

p.s., For those of you accessing the templates via the Web address listed above, you will see the following screen.  Select the type of template you are looking for from the section on the right. 

However, we don’t want to have to manually change the value in the shape every time we change the region.  Instead, we can actually link our shape directly to the cell that contains the total.  For instance, in the case above, we could link our shape to cell C22, so that every time C22 changes, the value in the shape changes. 

To do this, we need to have our shape active, but don’t want to type any text into it.  Click on the outside edge of the shape until it activates (you’ll either see the fuzzy line around the border in Excel 2003 or you will see the re-size handles shown below in Excel 2007.)

Once the shape is active, click in the formula bar and type in the formula   =C22, as shown above.  Hit Enter.  Now, whenever the value changes in cell C22, the value will also change in the shape.  On the other hand, if you see the text, “=c22” in your shape, you likely didn’t have the shape activated correctly.  Delete the text from the shape and try activating it again by clicking on the outside border.  You may need to click on the border more than once in order to activate the shape rather than activating the text editing within it.

Just as a side note, we used a pivot table in the above example but this may be somewhat risky in terms of linking the grand total to a shape.  The number of rows in a pivot table can change depending on the filters selected (e.g., some regions may not have had fuel spending in one or two months, so the total might appear in C20 or C18 instead.)  We’ll talk about a way around this over the next few posts.

That said, the long weekend is here and I’m declaring it an extra long weekend, so we’ll see you again on Tuesday morning!  Have a great weekend! 

First, let’s insert a shape which we will use to capture the note.  In Excel 2003, look for the Drawing toolbar (if you don’t see it, right-click on any button and ensure the Drawing toolbar is active), and then select Auto-Shapes and click on one of the shapes.  In Excel 2007, select Insert/Shapes and click on a shape.  Then, left-click your mouse on the spot on your spreadsheet where you’d like to insert the shape, and drag to specify the size of the shape you want to add.  You should see something like the following on your sheet:

Once you’ve got your shape, you then need to ‘activate’ it.  Do this by clicking on the border of the shape.  Next, right-click on the border and select Properties in Excel 2003 or Size and Properties in Excel 2007.  Switch to the Properties tab and de-select “Print Object.”  This allows the shape to appear on the screen but not on the printed page.

Finally, with the shape activated, you should be able to simply start typing your note and see the text appear in the shape.  If you don’t see any text appear, activate the shape again by clicking on the border, and then use your right-click to bring up the menu and select Edit Text.

This provides a quick and clean method to provide on-screen instructions without messing up the printed reports.

Alternatively, if you’d rather ‘eyeball’ the margin sizes, you can go into the Print Preview screen and select “Show Margins.”  This causes fine lines to appear around the preview page, which you can left-click and drag to make the margin larger or smaller as required.   

The second line at the top and bottom designates how much space will be left for the header and footer.  If you don’t have headers or footers, then you could drag the 2 lines to exactly the same spot and it won’t matter.  If you only see one line at the top or bottom, someone has already put the 2 lines in exactly the same spot…just click and drag, and one of the lines will move.  If your text doesn’t move up or down after this as expected, then you likely grabbed the header or footer margin first.  Drag the other line instead and your margins should adjust as required.

In Excel 2007, simply switch to Page Layout and choose Print from the Headings section in the Sheet Options group.

In Excel 2003, you have to go into File / Page Setup / Sheet / Print / Row and column headings to turn this feature on.  (It would also work to follow this path in Excel 2007.)

The end result of this setting is something that looks like the following on your printed page:

On the Margins tab, you could change the margins for all of the sheets at once.  Likewise, on the Header/Footer tab, you could set the same headers and footers for each and every sheet.  On the Sheet tab, you could use any of the options in the lower half of that tab.  However, the only Page Setup features you can’t set with multiple sheets selected are setting the print area for each sheet and specifying which rows to repeat at the top of each page.  This kind of makes sense, from the perspective that if you do happen to have different information on each of the sheets, it might take up a different number of rows and columns on each one.  However, when you think about how much freedom you have to accidentally type over other cells, you’d think that would be more of a risk than accidentally not printing a certain piece of one sheet.  Maybe that’s just my view, though.  :>

Have a great weekend!

Let’s assume, for now however, that we have 4 sheets that all contain a similar set up that we would like to change slightly, for instance, the 4 sheets that we created automatically earlier this week, in “Report Recurrence,” through our Report Filter options.  Each sheet has the same pivot table on it, starting in cell A1.  After we select all four tabs, we can then highlight rows 1 to 4 (again, you do this by left-clicking on the 1 at the far left of the sheet and dragging your mouse down to the 4). 

Then right-click anywhere on the selected area and choose Insert.  You can now switch to any of the other tabs and verify that four rows have been inserted on each tab…or, you can just take my word for it.  If you don’t want to do that, don’t forget to re-select all four tabs before you proceed!

Next, let’s add the title that we want to see appearing on each of the sheets.  Click on cell A1 and type in, “Monthly Revenue and Profit Statistics by Region.”  In cell A2, we could type, “For YTD 2009.”  Once again, if you flip to any of the other tabs, as long as they were all selected when you were typing, you will see the titles on each of the tabs.

Finally, again with all the tabs selected, highlight cells A1 and A2, and change the font size and choose Bold font.  As before, these changes will also appear on all the tabs.  There are a fair number of changes that can be made on multiple sheets at once.  If they cannot be made on multiple sheets, they will be “greyed-out” in your menu options.  Which is another point – if you are working in Excel and your menu options won’t work because they are greyed-out, check to ensure that you haven’t accidentally selected multiple tabs.  If you have done this, then before proceeding, you may also want to check what you have accidentally changed in the non-active sheet!

That’s it for today!