I'm assuming you are talking about a Pivot Table.
If you have several columns for different dimensions / values such as:
Cost Margin Sales Tax
which are taken from different columns of your source data and try to
use grand totals to get it to add these up then Excel won't do this. It
sees them as being discrete and does not add them up. This makes some
sense - imagine in the above example if the margin and tax were in %
terms instead of actual monetary values. It makes no sense to add $ to %
as pure numbers.
If you have one "column" (dimension, field) such as product category,
and lots of actual columns showing, one for each category found in your
data, then row totals will work - it is adding up all the things which
fall into this field.
Typically this kind of oddity happens when the source data is already
halfway to looking like a report, rather than pure database style.
So:
Customer Cost Margin Tax
A 1000 20 50
B 1500 30 75
will not work, whereas
Customer Type Value
A Cost 1000
A Margin 20
A Tax 50
B Cost 1500
etc
would be perfect to pivot and let row totals do somw work for you.
But all is lost.
Instead of row totals, you could use a formula in the pivot table to
generate a new field for the total of the fields you choose, this also
enables you to do things like multiplying as well as addition.
If you think this will help and need more of a step by step on this,
reply back.
Adam
