Excel – Sorting an Excel Pivot Table by a calculated field

excelexcel-pivotpivotpivot table

I have the following Excel spreadsheet:

     A              B              C              D    
1   Product        Category         Sale        Margin
2   Product A       Apparel          500          45%
3   Product A       Apparel          400          30%
4   Product A       Shoes            600          55%
5   Product B       Apparel          300          20%
6   Product C       Beauty           100          40%
7   Product C       Shoes            200          65%
8   Product D       Apparel          450          25%
9   Product D       Beauty           700          50%
10  Product D       Beauty           250          35%

Based on this data I create a Pivot Table.
In this Pivot table I added the following Calculated Field to get the profit:

   Profit = Sale * Margin

which leads to the following Pivot Table:

            Sum of Profit
Product A     1.950
Product B        60
Product C       315
Product D     1.540

Now, I want to sort this Pivot Table descending so it looks like the following:

              Sum of Profit
Product A        1.950
Product D        1.540
Product C          315
Product B           60

It seems that for a Calculated Field the sorting options in the PivotTable-Tools is not available.

Do you have any other idea how I can achieve this sorting?

NOTE: I know that I could add the calculation of the profit in Column E in the source data. However, my original file is a bit more complex compared to the simplified example above so a Calculated Field is unavoidable.

Best Answer

Right click on a cell in the Calculated Field --> Sort --> Sort largest to smallest.

Or you can try the following code to sort the calculated field.

Sub SortCalculatedField()
Dim ws As Worksheet
Dim pt As PivotTable

Set ws = Sheets("Sheet1")   'This is the sheet which contains Pivot Table
Set pt = ws.PivotTables(1)
pt.PivotFields("Product").AutoSort xlDescending, "Sum of Profit", pt.PivotColumnAxis.PivotLines(1), 1
End Sub

Related Solutions

C# – How to create an Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file in C# without installing Microsoft Office

You can use a library called ExcelLibrary. It's a free, open source library posted on Google Code:

ExcelLibrary

This looks to be a port of the PHP ExcelWriter that you mentioned above. It will not write to the new .xlsx format yet, but they are working on adding that functionality in.

It's very simple, small and easy to use. Plus it has a DataSetHelper that lets you use DataSets and DataTables to easily work with Excel data.

ExcelLibrary seems to still only work for the older Excel format (.xls files), but may be adding support in the future for newer 2007/2010 formats.

You can also use EPPlus, which works only for Excel 2007/2010 format files (.xlsx files). There's also NPOI which works with both.

There are a few known bugs with each library as noted in the comments. In all, EPPlus seems to be the best choice as time goes on. It seems to be more actively updated and documented as well.

Also, as noted by @АртёмЦарионов below, EPPlus has support for Pivot Tables and ExcelLibrary may have some support (Pivot table issue in ExcelLibrary)

Here are a couple links for quick reference:
ExcelLibrary - GNU Lesser GPL
EPPlus - GNU (LGPL) - No longer maintained
EPPlus 5 - Polyform Noncommercial - Starting May 2020
NPOI - Apache License

Here some example code for ExcelLibrary:

Here is an example taking data from a database and creating a workbook from it. Note that the ExcelLibrary code is the single line at the bottom:

//Create the data set and table
DataSet ds = new DataSet("New_DataSet");
DataTable dt = new DataTable("New_DataTable");

//Set the locale for each
ds.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
dt.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

//Open a DB connection (in this example with OleDB)
OleDbConnection con = new OleDbConnection(dbConnectionString);
con.Open();

//Create a query and fill the data table with the data from the DB
string sql = "SELECT Whatever FROM MyDBTable;";
OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(sql, con);
OleDbDataAdapter adptr = new OleDbDataAdapter();

adptr.SelectCommand = cmd;
adptr.Fill(dt);
con.Close();

//Add the table to the data set
ds.Tables.Add(dt);

//Here's the easy part. Create the Excel worksheet from the data set
ExcelLibrary.DataSetHelper.CreateWorkbook("MyExcelFile.xls", ds);

Creating the Excel file is as easy as that. You can also manually create Excel files, but the above functionality is what really impressed me.

Excel – Pivot Calculated formula: SUM(Field1)/AVG(Field2)

In case anyone else comes across this problem, a solution that I've found is to add a helper "Count" column to your data set, where each record has a 1 entered under the "Count" field.

Then, in order to achieve the effect of an Average, you can use:

SUM(FIELD_TO_AVERAGE)/SUM(COUNT)

I believe this should work in all cases where an average is needed, but I haven't tested it very broadly.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

C# – How to create an Excel (.XLS and .XLSX) file in C# without installing Microsoft Office

Excel – Pivot Calculated formula: SUM(Field1)/AVG(Field2)

Related Topic