problem when refreshing PivotTable

[Arno Wouters]

I use office X on Mac OS 10.3.5. I have an Excel worksheet with several
pivottables with worked fine for some days. However suddenly I get the
following error message when I try to refresh any table:

The PivotTable field name is not valid. To create a PivotTable, you
must use data that is organized as a list with labeled columns. if you
are changing the name of a PivotTable field, you must type a new name
for the field.

I cannot create a new independent PivotTable, this generates the same
error message, but I can create a new PivotTable based on an old one
(however, this one seems to be based on old data). However, if I refresh
that "new" table I get the error message.

I googled for "PivotTable field name is not valid" and found an article
in the MS knowledge base about a similar problem in XL2000:
<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;213955>. This
article suggest that the error occurs if "the first row of the range
from which the PivotTable is attempting to pull data contains one or
more empty cells'". I am not quite sure what this means. I assume the

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello Arno-

In order for most of Excel's data management/analysis tools to work,
the data range needs to have captions in the first row of the area
occupied by the data.

Each caption (field name) must also be contained within a single cell
on that first row. If you need a long field name in a relatively narrow
column, apply the Wrap Text format property to the one cell containing
the entire name and adjust the row height as necessary. IOW, _do not_
allow your field names to occupy cells in 2 or more rows.

HTH |:>)