Hình 4-119. Icon Set hướng Biểu tượng Thiết lập các giá trị tượng trưng bởi vị trí của họ trong một quy mô phần trăm thông qua các biểu tượng được chỉ định. Vì vậy, nếu tôi chọn tùy chọn đầu tiên và áp dụng nó vào phạm vi lớp, các định dạng có điều kiện trông như thế này | CHAPTER 8 PIVOTTABLES AND PIVOT CHARTS that list of family expenses. Turn this database into a table as we saw in Chapter 6 and you could for example filter Newspaper and or Telephone expenses and calculate their respective contributions to the budget and an Advanced Filter would enable you to save those data to another location on the worksheet. You could also generate a count of the number of Newspaper or Telephone payments by clicking on Count Number in the Expenses cell in the table s Total row. But if you need a more comprehensive breakout say you want to see Newspaper costs by each month in which three variables or fields are considered at the same time Expense Date and Sum then the task becomes more challenging. My professional recommendation you need a PivotTable. Indeed the revised budget portrait we presented in Chapter 1 Figure 8-2 Figure 8-2. The budget data broken out by category and month was engineered by a PivotTable. Data from two fields Expense and Date form a set of borders around the actual expense data which are then broken out into individual totals at the intersections of each Expense and each Date in this case defined in monthly units of course some of the intersections are blank simply because that type of expense wasn t incurred that particular month . It s this sort of thing that a PivotTable can do with ease and the sort of thing that a table can t. This object used to be called a crosstab a kind of matrix in which data were organized by one variable displayed horizontally in the above case by Date and another displayed vertically Expense . PivotTables are latter-day electronic descendants of the crosstab and once you acquire a basic understanding of how they work you can cook one up in about four seconds at the same speed as an Excel chart. It s true that PivotTables are viewed by some users as a rather forbidding and daunting object-and I ll allow that when I first set eyes on a PivotTable in pre-millennium New York I had no clue what
