months counting problem in Pivot Table

**gutkinma** · 09-07-2011, 08:19 AM

Hi Everyone.

Sorry if that has been solved before, I just found nothing so far.
I have faced a problem working in Pivot Table.
I have set ROW LABLES to be months and years, and then in the SUM VALUES I have stated that I want Difference in % of a previous month.
I had only 2 years of data: 2010 and 2011. In 2010 (as it should), first field (Junuary 2010) was blank, as Excel had nothing to compare the data to. But then in January 2011 field came up to be blank as well, meaning Excel does not recongnize 12.2010 to be previous month of 01.2011.

Has anyone had similar problem before?

Many Thanks

**Andy Pope** · 09-07-2011, 08:38 AM

can you post example file to illustrate your problem.

**MarvinP** · 09-07-2011, 08:51 AM

Hi gutkinma and welcome to the forum,

After playing awhile with my attached pivot table, you are correct. The previous looks to be using the row previous, which is blank because of the grouping.

Maybe you should ungroup the dates (don't group by year) and see if that gives you the answer you want.

**gutkinma** · 09-07-2011, 10:29 AM

Thank you Andy and MarvinP,

Andy, sorry not to be clear, there is a small example attached. You can see, Jan2011 is empty, although, it should have had value of difference, comparing to Dec2010.

MarvinP, unfortunately, I was not the one putting data together, and I am not too sure I can rearrange it the way you have in your attached example.
And the amount of data is very large (not the example, the actual data I am working with), so I can't do it manually.

Thank you both again

**Andy Pope** · 09-07-2011, 11:11 AM

Using just the month field will not allow the PT to understand the row 2 is not the same as row 14 in your data.

You need a proper date field in order to do what you describe.