standard error in a pivot table

[Guest]

I use large data files which I need to sort by several different criteria and
then calculate a mean and standard error for the records. The Pivot Table
works just great for saving me all the headache of sorting and performing
calculations for the mean, but as far as I know, it cannot calculate standard
error, only standard deviation.
Adding a calculated field will not help because ideally I would need to
perform the calculations based on the "average", "count" and "standard
deviation" fields and Pivot Tables do not allow use of averages and standard
deviations when creating a calculated field. My lists are to long to include
as a row or column instead of the "data" area, so I am stuck. My categories
are too complicated to just include a calculation outside of the table
because then I would have to do a ridiculous amount of copying and pasting
values to get it back in a format which I require to do further calculations
and analysis. I like the Pivot Tables because it would allow me to make
modifications to the data set and not have to backtrack to repair and confirm
thousands of lines of data.
Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas that might help me overcome this
difficulty? It seems that unless I can fix this, Pivot Tables are going to
be absolutely useless to me, I cannot figure out why a standard error field
is not already an included option, it is a very important tool in statistical
anyalysis.

Thanks for your time.

 

[Guest]

I'm assuming you can't calculate standard error off your source table?

As to why the pivot table doesn't have the capability of calculating
standard error: there are hundreds of available functions in Excel and
doubtless someone somewhere would like to use every one of them in a pivot
table. Programmers being a scarce resource like anything else, decisions
have to be made about which functions to include in the pivot table and which
not to.

Dave