Hi everyone,

I've worked with excel for awhile now so I'm fairly familiar with it, but I'm stumped on a recent project I've been given. We have weekly sales numbers from about 30 stores, and my goal is to create an aesthetically pleasing and simple to understand chart/pivottable/graph etc. that displays the year over year growth for comparable weeks each year (the data organizes weeks sunday to Saturday, so it wont match exactly on the calendar year to year but itll mainly account for seasonal variances.)

I've considered doing a database format, where I use values for the stores location, weekly sales amount, the week (numerically listed 1-52), the year, etc, and create an individual entry for each store, for each week. Then I could make a pivottable to display the sales numbers, and I could change the "value field setting" to display values as a "percentage of", "year", and "previous", but this is kind of data overload with this many stores, and also I don't think the values it gives are necessarily the growth of, for example, week 3 of this year compared to week 3 of last year. In fact, I really don't know what it is using as the base value, I think it takes the average of all the values for one year, and compares each number for next year against that value. Also, I think it holds the first year as the base value, and compares each other year to that, which isn't what I'm looking for.

I also need this to be scalable into the future, so that in 2016 it will be able to display the growth from 2014 to 2015, and 2015 to 2016, for every store, again, without being totally unreadable.

Does anyone have any ideas? Like I said, I know how to work with excel reasonably well, but I'm at a loss for which direction to go here. I think a Pivottable is a good option because with the amount of data I'm working with, it would be nice to manipulate it easily to show only certain things at a time, in case there is no way to show this amount of data simplistically.

If you need any more information, feel free to ask.

Thanks for your help,

manning457