Comments on: AutoFilter a PivotTable

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:45:22 +0000

Many thanks for the autofilter trick. My question is, once you apply the auto filters, is there a way to get to the source data for only the values you’ve filtered on?

By: Murphy Mac

Murphy Mac — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:56:03 +0000

Thanks – didn’t think my Autofilter would work til I saw this post.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:15:50 +0000

Ahhhh. Of course. What an idiot I am…I use this functionalityall the time in the form of the ‘Top 10′ filter.

Thanks Colin and Sam.

It’s kinda weird that Microsoft would bury this functionality in a right click menu, rather than have this option available right off the filter menu at the top of each pivot column (i.e. the menu that comes up if you click on say the “Dates” filter icon). But then, it’s also weird that you can’t access ‘More sort options’ in the same way.

By: Colin Banfield

Colin Banfield — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 12:53:34 +0000

Jeff, try something like the following:

Create a column labeled “Dates” and fill down several dates in multiple months. Create a second column labeled “Revenue” and fill down with random numbers, say =ROUND(RAND()*1000000,0).

Now create a pivot table from the data. Group the dates in the row field by month and year. Right-click in the Date field (which has the dates grouped in months) and select Filter–>Value Filters… Select a “Greater Than” value filter, based on the aggregated numbers you have in the data area. You will notice that the pivot table is filtered based on the aggregated numbers, and not on the underlying numbers that make up the totals.

By: Jeff Weir

Jeff Weir — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:16:28 +0000

Colin…I’m not sure you do get the same result for a data field under 2007 by filtering at the lowest level as you do with this trick. I understand that you can filter a field on a specific value, but that you can’t filter that same field based on aggregated totals.

That is, say you wanted to filter your ‘sum of price’ field so that any revenue over $1000 from various items was excluded. I don’t think you can do this by filtering a row field. Yes, you can filter out things in say a ‘price’ row that might individually over $1000 . But that’s different from filtering out those aggregate totals (i.e. revenue) from your ‘sum of price’ field of any items that didn’t return more than $1000 in total.

Could be that I’m misunderstanding your scenario.