Views on the pivot table

The end of the old and the beginning of the new year is often a reason to look back. I read this post a while ago and it seems that I could have clarified one of the things better. There are many different views on pivot tables, and as Nectar’s advertising slogan says, “It does matter” In this “recipe” we will deal with each of them, after which you can decide for yourself when to apply which view to get a suitable report.

The default view of the newly created Pivot spreadsheet is the Compact Form. You will easily recognize it by “Row Labels” text in the header, and it displays one or more report dimensions that appear in the Rows field. If there’s more of them they are presented hierarchically at a way that each subordinate dimension is slightly indented. The advantage of this view is takes much less space. The Expand and Collapse options are represented by the “+” and “-” symbols and provide a view over the report with more or less detail (unless they are explicitly excluded by clicking the Buttons option in the Analyze ribbon).

We can change the view by selecting a new one from the Report Layout menu located in the Design Ribbon.

Tabular Form displays the report as a spreadsheet. Each dimension found in the Rows section is displayed in a separate column, which makes the report more transparent.

Outline Form is similar to the previous view. It differs in that it shows the subtotals at the top of each row.

There are two other options at the bottom of this menu. Activating the first repeats all row names, and activating the second disables this feature.