How do I easily view trends over categories in my data

[Alexander DK]

Hi,

This is probably an easy question, but I haven't been able to find the
answer in the help files/archives.

Say I have a set of sales data for a company, something like:

Date Category sell price
01-02-07 Electronics $20.00
05-02-07 Electronics $15.50
07-02-07 Software $30.00

and so on. I would like to be able to create a graph for each category
showing how much the company sold for on any given day. In addition, I would
like the graph to include days where the company didn't sell anything. In the
above example, the data I would like to graph would therefore, for
electronics, be

Date sell price
01-02-07 $20.00
02-02-07 $0
03-02-07 $0
04-02-07 $0
05-02-07 $15.50
06-02-07 $0

et cetera. Having graphed also the days with zero sales makes it more
convenient to analyze. I would like an easy way to make such graphs for each
category of data. I've tried to do this with pivottables/pivotcharts, but I
can't seem to get the "empty" days into my data. I am using Excel 2007.

Thanks in advance!

Best Regards, Alexander

 

[Roger Govier]

Hi Alexander

You will need to make entries in your source data table for the relevant
dates with 0 as the Sales Value.
The PT and the Pivot Chart can only report on data that is physically within
the table.
You would need your source data to look something like
Date Category sell price
01/02/2007 Electronics 20
02/02/2007 Electronics 0
03/02/2007 Electronics 0
04/02/2007 Electronics 0
05/02/2007 Electronics 15.5
06/02/2007 Electronics 0
07/02/2007 Software 30
07/02/2007 Electronics 0

It doesn't matter in the data table what order the values are entered, but
to make the PT and the Chart more logical, Right click on the Date
field>Sort>More options>Ascending