A common requirement in the business world is to compare financial information year to year to see what the trend is. Pivot tables and charts are commonly used to slice and dice the information. However, it is not always easy when comparing years in excel pivot charts.
Table of contents
YouTube Compare seasonality in Pivot Tables
Years shown sequentially in most Pivot Charts
Below is what you may get when you run your report. You can see all the months in a straight line.
However, you want to see the years on top of each other, something like the below to allow for comparing years in the Excel Pivot Chart (easier to spot any trends or seasonality).
Make the Pivot Chart years appear on top of each other
To achieve this you need to make use of the Grouping feature of Pivot Tables.
Right click on one of the dates and choose grouping as shown below.
Choose both the month and the year option and click OK as below
You will notice that your Pivot Table now shows the months and years separately and in the fields you now have a Years and Months item.
When you now move the Years into the columns section you can compare the years against each other
Related
Change the name of items directly in the Pivot Table
Turn off automatic date and time grouping in Excel Pivot Tables