Excel Month on Month Movement

A PivotTable solution

If you need to find the movement from the previous month a PivotTable can be your friend and do most of the work for you.

Let’s take this PivotTable that reports Margin over a period.

We want to see the percentage change against the previous month.

To do that drag the Margin field to the Values section again. Yes, you can have a value field in the values section more than once.

Right click a value in the new column and choose Show Values As and select  % Difference From.

In the second drop down choose (previous) and click OK.

The PivotTable is changed as shown below. Note the correct format is automatically applied.

 

Headings

PivotTables have an issue with headings. In the above image you can see the headings are not correct or that helpful.

Luckily, we can modify them. The only rule is that you cannot use a name that is the same as a column heading in the data. So you can’t use Margin for column B, but you can use Margin followed by a space. Or put a space in front of Margin. I have modified the headings in the report below.

That reads a lot better than the default version.

Please note: I reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive or off-topic.

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