chipped

pivot table gone wrong

What’s wrong with this Pivot Table?

The supply chain manager showed me his pivot table and immediately, I saw that he had done the pivot table wrongly.

Imperfect Pivot Table

This mistake is very common. In fact, most users thought that it is ok. 

But when you are showing this to your audience, it just distracts them and attracts more questions.

It is done out of convenience but this does not leave a good impression. 

You can hide them by filtering blanks but you might accidentally remove valid blanks from your Pivot Table.

So what exactly is the problem with this pivot table?

The <24/3/2021 column should not be displayed. It was there because the supply chain manager selected the entire columns for the fields and the Pivot Table included the blank rows below the real data.

If this is done with Data Analytics, it will definitely be flagged out as error. In some pivot tables, it may even disable the ability to sum up the numbers. 

A good Pivot Table should look like this.

Good Pivot Table

Hope it helps you.

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