Creating a PivotChart

A PivotChart is nothing more than a standard Excel chart created from the data in a PivotTable report. In fact there are a few features in PivotCharts that you will not find in charts based on other data—that is, data not in a PivotTable. For the most part, however, a PivotChart is like any other Excel chart and can be manipulated and formatted in the same way. The few differences will be covered as they come up.
Now you can go ahead and create a PivotChart based on the PivotTable report that you created earlier in this chapter, the one showed in Figure 1-9:

Figure 1-9

1. Make sure the PivotTable is active.
2. Click the PivotChart button on the Options ribbon. Excel displays the Insert Chart dialog box, shown in Figure 1-15. 

Figure 1-15: Selecting the type of chart for a PivotChart.

1. Select Column in the Templates list; then click the second chart template in the first row.
2. Click OK to create the chart.

The resulting chart is shown in Figure 1-16. Each store is represented by a bar in the chart, and within each bar the different categories are differentiated by color or shading.

Figure 1-16: A PivotChart based on the video rental data PivotTable.

Although the chart or the underlying PivotTable is active, Excel displays the PivotChart Filter Pane, also shown in Figure 1-16. You can use the Axis Fields and Legend Fields elements in this pane to filter the data so that the PivotChart displays only a subset of the data. Any filtering that you select here is applied to the PivotTable itself, and the chart automatically reflects this change in the PivotTable. For example, Figure 1-17 shows the PivotTable and chart after filtering has been applied to show only the Clarkville and Main Street stores.

Figure 1-17: The PivotTable and PivotChart can be filtered to show a subset of the data.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website