Excel Pivot Table How to Sort data as Percent of Row

[Pat]

Excel Pivot Table How to Sort data as Percent of Row

In Excel 2003 you could display data in a pivot table as percent of row then
sort the percentage. In Excel 2007 this does not work. Is there a work around
this was a very valuable feature and it take too long to copy and past the
table just so you can sort it.

 

[Shane Devenshire]

Hi,

I have no problem sorting the percent of row numbers? I put my cursor in
the column I want to sort on and click the Data, Ascending or Descending
button. Please supply us with more detail.

 

[Pat]

Here is an example.

If you just use the data in the pivot table and sort it works fine.

Region 1/1/09 2/1/09 3/1/09 4/1/09 GTot
Amercas 59139 47732 59615 53393 219879
Asia 2310 2981 2895 1816 10002
EMEA 3650 557 586 648 5441
GTot 65099 51270 63096 55857 235322

However if you go to filed settings and display the data as "% of Row" as
seen here

Region 1/1/09 2/1/09 3/1/09 4/1/09 GTot
Amercas 26.90% 21.71% 27.11% 24.28% 100.00%
Asia 23.10% 29.80% 28.94% 18.16% 100.00%
EMEA 67.08% 10.24% 10.77% 11.91% 100.00%
GTot 27.66% 21.79% 26.81% 23.74% 100.00%

Then when you try and sort the percentages it sorts the underlying values
not the percentages. This only happens in Excel 2007 and did not happen in
Excel 2003.

 

[Pat]

I have solved it on my own. The problem is that the defaults are set to Auto
Sort. So when I was trying to manually sort the data it was resorting back to
the default. If you set all the sort options to Manual in the advanced sort
section it will work as expected.

 

[Shane Devenshire]

--
If this helps, please click the Yes button.

Cheers,
Shane Devenshire

 

[Shane Devenshire]

Hi,

Well the reason it didn't happen in 2003 is 2003 didn't have all the option
(power) of 2007. Also, this problem really had nothing to do with the % of
Row option.

 

[Pat]

I agree it had nothing to do with the % of row. However the feature is not
working as expected and there may still be a bug.
The way I discover the solution is that if you change the field from "% of
row" to "% Different from (Previous)" you actually get an error (warning)
that it is not going to work "AutoSort and AutoShow cannot be used with
custom calculations that use positional reference. Do you want to turn off
AutoSort/Show?" This does not appear in the "% of Row" situation. The bug is
that weather you choose Yes or No the data still will not sort unless you
turn off the AutoSort from the More Sort Options on the on the row header.
Being able to choose Yes and have the option automatically turned off would
be helpful. In addition the setting only applies to the current row header.
If you pivot on a different row the setting does not stay and needs to be
reapplied.