I have a sheet (let’s go with wines as an example) that lists every bottle of wine in my cellar, when I bought it, how much I paid etc.
There’s a column that describes the wine in comma-separated tags such as “Fruity, White”.
I’ve created a pivot table from that data, with the description as a filter column. However I can’t filter it by “White”. I have to find every description that contains “White” such as “Dry, White”, “White, Crisp” etc.
Being from an RDBMS background, my natural inclination is to put the tags in their own table keyed against the wine row so there’s zero-or-more tag rows per wine row.
How, how on earth can I use that to filter the wine rows?
Yes you can do it within Excel and the description fields can remain as “Dry, White” etc as you do not need to split the comma separated values.
Lets say the Table source comprises a text column for Description, a number column for Value and a number column for Year Bought.
Your pivot is setup with the the following
Fields: Description, Value and Year Bought.
Column labels: Year Bought
There is a drop down label filter on the row labels – click on this and there should be an option to select Label Filters. Select this and then select Contains. You can enter say “White” which will select all your descriptions that contain white e.g. “Dry, White”, “White, Crisp”. The filter includes ? to represent a single character and * to represent any series of characters.
There are similar label filters for “begins with” and “ends with” as well as there negation.
I tried this in Excel 2007 and it should also work in 2003. I think in Excel 2003 you could even combine the filters e.g. contains “White” and does not contain “Dry” but in 2007 I could not find a way of doing this.