Quick & dirty update!
AWW WOW! Excel 2013 allows the addition of a timeline into Pivot Charts! (not included with Excel for Mac)
Let’s say you have a lot of dates and want to see graphic summaries grouped by month or year. Before 2013, that called for a pivot chart. And “group” by month or by year.
Excel 2013 has an automatic feature called “Insert Timeline.”
The image below shows membership levels by state for donations generated through Campaign B. In the box labeled ‘Date’ that’s the timeline with 2011 selected. The second image shows 2010 activity. The only change is the selection of 2010 in the Timeline.
What’s the big deal?
- This makes data visualization so much easier, especially for ad hoc inquiries
- Creating dashboards is easier, lightening the load of SUMIFS and COUNTIFS
One concern is about memory and performance if a document has a lot of pivot charts and timelines. If it’s a concern, at what level does a document start to get sluggish? If anyone can answer that, please do. If I find out myself, I’ll let everyone know.
It’d be great to hear from people who are using Excel 2013 and how it’s going. It was a hassle uninstalling the beta version of Excel 2013 but I like what I see in Office 2013.
