Field Well Options

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video, we're going to look at the Field Well options.
• 00:07 The reason for this is actually twofold.
• 00:09 Number one, so that if you see that I have a different view than you,
• 00:12 it's not a big deal because you'll know how to change it.
• 00:14 And the second one is that it gives you more options for
• 00:17 when you're configuring your Pivot Table to sometimes
• 00:20 make it a little bit easier to actually work with as well.
• 00:23 So what is the Field Well?
• 00:24 Well, that's the area when we click inside our Pivot Table, that usually
• 00:28 pops up in this list on the right-hand side, although sometimes it doesn't.
• 00:31 And the reason being is because you could have dismissed it by clicking
• 00:34 the little close button here.
• 00:36 Normally this Field Well menu will show up,
• 00:38 not when you click outside the Pivot Table, it always goes away,
• 00:41 but when you click back inside the Pivot Table.
• 00:43 So if it doesn't show up, what do you do?
• 00:46 Well, there's a couple of different ways to do this.
• 00:48 Right-click, we can say Show Field List, the very last item on the list,
• 00:52 it will actually bring this back up.
• 00:54 In addition, if you go to your Pivot Table tools Analyze tab, or
• 00:58 in newer versions Office 365, it's just Pivot Table Analyze.
• 01:03 If you click on this, you'll notice that way across on the right-hand side, you'll
• 01:07 see the Field List button, which can also be used to turn the field list on and off.
• 01:11 Now, there are different configuration options for working inside this area, why?
• 01:17 Well, it's because on some screen resolutions,
• 01:19 you don't have a lot of room to work with down in the bottom right-hand corner where
• 01:23 we actually do all of our work.
• 01:24 Notice that when I come down here and say, hey, I'm going to add item name into
• 01:29 my rows area of my Pivot Tables, it's now completely full.
• 01:32 Now, it doesn't stop me from adding more things.
• 01:34 I could come back up and say hey,
• 01:36 I want to take the ChitNumber and I'm going to slide it down in here,
• 01:39 but it gets really hard to work with inside this tiny little window here.
• 01:43 So are there other options to play with?
• 01:44 And the answer of course, is yes.
• 01:47 Under the gear icon on our Field Well, we can actually go and change the views and
• 01:51 there's a few different ones to work with.
• 01:54 You can work with the Fields section and Area section stacked.
• 01:58 This is the default view that we see right now, which has our fields list up the top,
• 02:02 and then the actual Field Well in a 2 by 2 grid down the bottom.
• 02:06 We could change this to go to Field Section Only.
• 02:09 This is just going to give us a list of our fields.
• 02:11 Now, the problem with that, of course, is that we can't actually go and
• 02:14 drag and drop things into different places.
• 02:16 So it's nice to see the list if we want to just check the boxes on or off.
• 02:20 But beyond that, it's not really very helpful.
• 02:22 We have an Area Section Only 2 by 2.
• 02:25 This one can be useful if we need more space,
• 02:27 we don't have the field list with all the fields.
• 02:30 But if we're just trying to rearrange items and drag them up and down,
• 02:33 this gives us a little more room to work with, which can be pretty handy.
• 02:36 We have an alternate view of this as well, the Area Section Only 1 by 4,
• 02:40 which actually stacks them in this direction.
• 02:43 And the last one I want to show you is a hybrid, which is this one,
• 02:47 one of my personal favorites, Fields and Areas Sections Side-By-Side,
• 02:51 which allows me to get into this view.
• 02:53 Now, I don't have a ton of room in this area,
• 02:55 but I can see a massive list of fields, which is useful.
• 02:58 So the nice thing around this is that we can actually flip back and
• 03:01 forth between different views that might be better for
• 03:04 us when we're actually configuring our Pivot Table.
• 03:06 Now, I'm going to flip back into the standard default order right now,
• 03:11 which looks like this,
• 03:12 where I now only have two different rows that I can actually play around with.
• 03:17 The one other thing I want to call out in this list is this, Deferred Layout Update.
• 03:22 Where this becomes super useful is when we have really large datasets, and it takes
• 03:26 a long time to refresh, because we're adding fields onto the actual Pivot Table.
• 03:30 When you click Deferred Layout Update, you can check the box, and
• 03:33 now I can move down this list and say, this POSChitNumber, I don't want it.
• 03:37 So I'm going to pull it off and I'm going to drag it off.
• 03:39 I'm just going to throw it over on the grid here.
• 03:41 This is the same, basically, as throwing it up in the field list at the top here.
• 03:45 The other thing is I'm going to say,
• 03:46 from my field list I really don't want Item Name on the Pivot Table either.
• 03:50 So I'll just uncheck the box.
• 03:51 So now you've got three ways to remove a field.
• 03:54 But notice that nothing is changed on the pivot table and
• 03:57 nothing will until I go and click this Update button right here.
• 04:01 And when I do that, it now updates the pivot table back to what it was and
• 04:05 I can uncheck the Deffered Layout Update.
• 04:07 Very important to make sure you click your Update button before you uncheck this box
• 04:10 or it will just toss the changes that you've actually made.
• 04:13 But this makes it a lot easier when you're trying
• 04:18 to configure big Pivot Tables as well.

Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.