How to sort pivot data in descending order in Google Sheets (Part 1)

-
One of the main benefits of working with spreadsheets is the ability to aggregate data, that means to sum up values, count a number of items, etc. Google Sheets has an easy built-in Pivot Table. If you are new to spreadsheets, start there.

If you are looking for an even more powerful solution, one that helps you have multiple pivot tables on one sheet OR one that allows you to show in which order you want to sort your numbers (ascending, descending), then the Query() function is what you need.


1. Pivot Tables



In the sheet above, the world's population is listed by country and column D holds the country's region. In the example below, we want to aggregate the world's populations by region. Click on Data, then Pivot Table report...
In the Report Editor, the field "Region" is added to the Rows and the field "Population" (which holds the population count from each country) is added to the Values section.



You can see that numbers are not ordered in increasing or decreasing order. That's because by default results are sorted by increasing order of numbers or text (alphabetical) of the first Row. For anyone who knows how easy it is to do that in Excel it can be quite frustrating, especially since the behavior affect how charts look like.



So, how can you sort values in our pivot table by decreasing order ? Not in the Report Editor, but with the Query() function. Click here to learn how to use the Query() function in Google Sheets to sort data in a more powerful way.

Have fun with spreadsheets !

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to calculate the quarter for a given date in Google Sheets

-
Image
Quarterly reporting is important for many businesses. While most spreadsheets can extract the day, date, month or year from a date with dedicated functions, none of them have  a built-in quarter() function .  In this article we will show you how you can easily get the quarter of the year from a date. 1. The month() function The month() function in Google Sheets gives you the month number from a date: if your cell A2 contains Sep-30 2017 or 9/30/2017, month(A2) will show "9". 2. A little math There are four quarters in a year with three months each. Month 1 is in Q1, month 5 is in Q2, month 6 is also in Q2, while month 7 is in Q3. The logic is simple enough that we want to automate this with some math. Here is the trick : if we know the month and divide the month by 3, we are almost there : We can see that March, June and December are in the right quarter number but for other months, the floating numbers are cause for concern. Well, not for long. 3. Rounding nu
Read more

How to sort pivot data in descending order in Google Sheets (Part 2)

-
Image
In Part 1 , we saw that Pivot table was the classic spreadsheet way of aggregating and displaying numbers from many rows and columns of data. We also saw that sorting the way we wanted is not always possible. Using the query() function is one way of doing that and it opens up many other possibilities. 2. the Query() function The Query() function can easily fix our sorting problem, but it requires some basic knowledge of SQL, a special language used to extract and order data from databases. Fortunately, the syntax used in Spreadsheets is simplified : The Query() is composed of 3 parameters : =query( source of data ,  the query itself ,  the column headers if required ). Here is an example and its result below : =query(facts!A1:D50,"SELECT D, sum(C) group by D order by sum(C) desc",1) This query gets two columns, Region (column B) and the sum of Population (column C) from the sheet called "facts". It then orders the table by decreasing order of Population
Read more