If Excel Video 293 doesn’t cover the best feature in a Pivot Table, it’s certainly in the top three. Pivot Tables are great for data analysis, but if you’re like me, you’ve had the experience of taking a report to a physician or an administrator and having them say, “Your numbers aren’t right.” The beauty of a Pivot Table is that you can double-click any of the values in the Pivot Table and Excel will open a new worksheet with a copy of the data that makes up that cell. Excel gives you the entire row of your source data, so it’s easy to do further analysis.
Notice that this is a copy of the data. You can do whatever you want to this copy of the data, including deleting the data, without changing your original data. There are a ton of applications for this trick. I help a group of orthopedic surgeons who double-click to drill down to their A/R detail every month. They assign their over 90 day A/R to staff members based on the copy of the data. The next month, they’ll do the double-click trick again to see how A/R’s been collected. They’ll compare this month’s copy of the data to last month’s copy of the data to make sure A/R’s being followed up on appropriately.
I use this trick all the time, and I hope you find it helpful. Thanks for watching.
