If you love the new PowerPivot add-in for Excel 2010, you can enter the latest contest on the PowerPivotPro blog. Show off your efficient PowerPivot techniques, and win one of the two top prizes — a 1 year MSDN subscription. Send in your sample workbooks, with charts and slicers and cross-filtering enabled. Impress Rob with [...]

If you rearrange the fields in a pivot chart layout, the related pivot table changes too. Unfortunately, there’s no setting you can change if you want the pivot chart and pivot table to work independently. As a workaround, you can create a second pivot table, based on the first one, and arrange it as you’d [...]

When you create a pivot chart, the series order is automatically applied. In this example, the product categories had been manually sorted in the pivot table. In the pivot chart legend, the products are in the same order: Crackers, Snacks, Bars and Cookies.   In a longer list of items, you might like the series [...]

After you create a column chart from a pivot table, you might want to change it so the chart is a combination chart type. You’d like most of the series to remain as columns, and one of the series to be a line. In Excel 2007 there are no Combination Chart types that you can [...]

If your pivot table is based on an Excel list, and you probably add records to the existing source data table. You’d like the source data range to automatically expand to include any new rows and columns. You don’t want to manually change the pivot table range every time you add new data. Create a [...]

You might have to make changes to a workbook that contains a pivot table. If someone else created that workbook, you may not be sure where to find the Excel table that was used as the pivot table’s source data. In some workbooks there can be several Excel tables, and it’s not immediately obvious which [...]

In Excel 2003, if you select a cell in the pivot table and click the Chart Wizard button on the Standard toolbar, a default pivot chart on a chart sheet is created. In some cases you might prefer to step through the Chart Wizard so you can set the options as you create the pivot [...]