Create Excel Reports the VBScript Way, Part 5

Microsoft Excel's PivotTable feature is a powerful tool. With it, you can organize large amounts of data into attractive, focused reports. PivotTable reports can group similar records together, produce group totals, filter specific data values, produce group sums, averages, minimums, and maximums, and do much more. This special Excel feature also demonstrates amazing performance when it comes to crunching large amounts of data. I think you’ll find programming PivotTable reports well worth the time and effort that you put into them.

The name “PivotTable” comes from the fact that it’s easy to move (pivot) data fields into or out of the PivotTable report. This functionality is great when you’re summarizing and analyzing data and you want to see the results of grouping data in different ways. I wrote a full-length article (“Produce Pivot Tables Programmatically,” InstantDoc ID 45502) about using VBScript to create pivot tables. That article covers the technical side of this topic in detail, and I encourage you to grab a copy of the helpful code that goes with it. However, because PivotTable reports are a key feature of this series about Excel reporting and I have more experience with them now than when I wrote the previous article, I’d like to elaborate on the subject in this article. . . .