Looking for a spreadsheet solution for a practical issue? Here are a good amount of Excel tips: Pivot Tables offer several significant benefits, which is why they’re so popular. But they also have significant limitations, which is why I seldom have used them in the past. The benefits are obvious. Pivot Tables offer a powerful ability for Excel users to explore relational data in Excel and to return sorted, summarized, and filtered slices of the data to spreadsheets. I don’t know of any other product that offers such power. On the other hand, from my perspective, Pivot Tables have always seemed to be merely a report generator bolted to Excel. They offer many reporting capabilities, but only one spreadsheet function-GETPIVOTDATA-to allow worksheet functions to use PivotTable data. Therefore, Excel users-again in my opinion-have always had to work much harder than we should to use data from one or more Pivot Tables in standard Excel reports. But finally, in Excel 2010, Microsoft added most of the features Excel users need to use Pivot Tables as a truly useful source of data for standard reporting and analysis. Because we can work around the missing features, we finally can use a collection of Pivot Tables as a powerful and massive spreadsheet database. Read More