If I have people who use reports I produce, who aren't Excel experts, what alternatives are there for drilling down into data as against using pivot tables?
Say, if I connect to an Access database with 300K+ records, listing drug prescriptions, and I summarise by drug category, but I want to drill-down to drug description, and finally patient ID, what would be the best/neatest alternative, if any, to pivot tables?
Regards,
TimC
Hi Tim,
I'd set up several PivotTables at the various levels you want people to be able to drill down to. Insert Slicers that are connected to all of your PivotTables and teach the users how to click the Slicers to filter the data as required.
Short of that the next best, or maybe better, alternative is Power BI which has built in drill down functionality that allows uses to click on a column in a chart and drill down. Doesn't get much easier than that!
Mynda
Thanks for that Mynda.
If I used Power BI, presumably anyone using the spreadsheet would need to have Power BI installed as well?
Enjoy your birthday next week. We'll be off to the the Welsh Mountains.
Kind regards,
TimC
If you use Power BI then you can share your report using the Power BI (online) Service and your users would need a Power BI account, but that's free, unless you decide you want to use some of the more advanced features.
Or you can share the Power BI desktop files, much like you'd share an Excel file, and your users would need to download and install the free Power BI Desktop tool. That said, the Power BI Service is the preferred way to share your Power BI reports.
Thanks for the birthday wishes 😉 Enjoy the mountains.
