Customer Reviews

Pivot Table Data Crunching

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

On the Excel Developer Mailing list that I subscribe to there are many talented and generous people whom freely share their Excel knowledge and experience with others less skilled. Numerous of them are MVP's.

Now when folks like Bob Umlas and Jon Peltier (whom are MVP Excel experts in their own rights) say a book is worth looking at, well, I definitely am keen to check it out.

Bill "Mr. Excel" Jelen and Michael Alexander's book on getting the best out of Pivot tables was recommended to me by Jon Peltier (http://peltiertech.com/ ) and what a great piece of advice it turned out to be.

Pivot table are one of Excel's most powerful features, and yet many users never harness the potential and power of this wonderful tool. I use pivot tables a lot and thought I had a good understanding of them, but this book has taken my productivity to a whole new level. Reading this book and understanding the concepts within has definitely been a "wow" experience for me.

The style of writing is excellent and extensive screenshots and notes make it easy to follow the necessary processes to quickly and painless achieve the desired outcome.

This book covers everything from the history of the Pivot table and data basics, right through to complex tasks involving calculated pivot fields, pivot charts and extracting data from external data sources such as an SQL database or OLAP cube.

Importantly the authors also explain in great detail the potential for risk and data errors and how to minimise the chances of errors being generated. A worthwhile process for anyone using excel.

Actually I loved the way the book was interesting and useful for all skill levels. Even if you had never created a pivot table before this book is very accessable and easy to follow. And for people like myself who are advanced Excel users, there is still an amazing amount of clever techniques to maximise the power of pivot tables.

As a professional excel developer this book has definitely added value to work and (more importantly) to the end products I produce for my clients. A "wow! That is great!" client is a happy client.

I am an Excel MVP and pretty much know Excel inside out, yet I learned so many cool things from this wonderful book! I was often confused knowing the difference between calculated fields and calculated items, but this book really cleared that up for me. I can't think of any piece of using pivot tables which was either left out or glossed over. The book will make you a pivot table master! Highly recommended, whether you're a beginner or an Excel guru!

I was encouraged by other reviewer's comments that this book was useful to beginners AND experts, but I disagree. I consider myself a fairly advanced user/macro developer, and was hoping this book would help me take my Pivot Table skills to another level. The book is laid out well - and DOES cover its topics thoroughly - but it is really more of a book for intermediate excel users who may have little to no experience with Pivots.

Do you use Pivot Tables in your work? Do you need to quantify the data returned by the Pivot Table?

This is the best reference I have found on Pivot Tables. Though I have been using Excel for over 10 years (since version 2.0), I found useful examples my first day.

I found out that I could do complex mathematical functions directly against the pivot data without building a second table or writing crazy macros.

The most cogent reasons for using this book are given in its first chapter. Namely why use a pivot table? And when to recognise when you might want to do so. While it is hard to strictly demarcate these questions, they are useful in focusing on the key issues.

For why to use, it is to reduce the chance of manual error, by letting you be able to automate several or even many steps. This also permits greater productivity. From having less occasion to redo erroneous steps, and from doing faster analysis. For when, it might be due to having a large data set, or to having to find certain relationships within this.

Given the above, the rest of the book proceeds to show how to make a pivot table. There is a clear description of the anatomy of the table, which helps greatly when going through the book.

I am familiar with pivot tables, but bought this book to enable me to hit the ground running at my new job that requires pivot table skills. The book was very easy to follow, unlike many Excel how-to books, and there are plenty of screen shots to check your progress. I would recommend this book to those in similar situations to mine, but it does not seem appropriate for those who have consirable experience with pivot tables.

This book is very reader friendly. The author did an outstanding job in bringing something so complex as Pivot Tables and making it understandable to all reader/user. The book also has good foundational write up and examples of VBA solutions.

This book is a really great reference and teaching tool for pivot tables. The only flaw is that sometimes it leaps from one view to another without saying how to get there. Other times a discussion uses a beginning view that is also unintuitive as to how to get there (how to get to the beginning point.) For me this is sort of OK since I am stubborn enough to keep poking around, trying different things until I am able to create the view, which actually helps me better learn the program. Also, there is a forum on their website on which other users or the author give answers or clues as to how the particular views in the book were derived. However, unless someone is stubborn or resourceful enough to do this type of investigation, I feel the reader would be left confused. For me, a somewhat minor flaw...for some it might be the end of the road in reading this book. Still, I think it is an excellent book and if one is serious about learning how to work with pivot tables, this is a great resource.

I have been looking for a book on Pivot Tables for along time, and I luckily stumbled across this one. I couldn't be happier. It's got tons of clear and examples that have given me lots of "ah ha!" moments. No matter what your level of Excel experience,this stuff is invaluable if you work with lots of data. Although it's specific to one area of Excel, this is my choice for the best Excel book this year.

This book has been easy to follow and to the point. I thought I knew about pivot tables until I read this book. Apparently I did'nt know what I didn't know. I would reccommend this book to all Excel users.