Thursday, August 13, 2009

Cheating Excel

Sometimes I feel like I am cheating excel. I feel sneaky about it and even a little bad. You see, the pivot table is a useful tool for creating charts from table data and formatting the information into quite a lovely little box.

The problem is, pivot tables make the spreadsheet heavy and bulky in terms of memory. I copy and past special the values and formats from the pivot table onto blank cells, then delete the pivot table. So I make the tool do all the grunt work, then skip out on the bulkiness and take all the credit for myself.