Excel Video 308 gives us one more way to show values in a Pivot Table. Truth be told, we didn’t necessarily save the best for last, but we did save the most complicated calculation for last. Microsoft uses the index calculation we’ll discuss today to describe the relative importance of a cell in a Pivot Table. The Tunnels location is our example today, and you’ll see that Tunnels is more important in 2009 compared to 2010 and 2011. Tunnels is also a higher percentage of the overall location total in 2009. As a result, Tunnels has a higher index value in 2009. Since Tunnels charges in 2011 is less important to 2011 and to the three-year total of Tunnels charges, its index value is less.
Index is kind of a murky calculation that’s hard to explain so, truth in advertising, I don’t use it much. It does give you a way to analyze how important a given combination of data (Tunnels in 2009) is to the overall total.
We’ll move next to calculations in Pivot Tables. I do a ton of calculations in my consulting, so I hope you’ll find those videos helpful. Thanks for watching.
