Not what I wanted to hear either, but if someone has a new solution to this.. I'd like something that would simply put my text into a list, either each item on a different line or comma separated.

My reasoning is that my church uses a schedule software that while it's great for the tech savvy, the print versions of schedules are lacking, with each person on their own line with fields for date, time, and service, and position they hold, I'd like to aggregate this data so that all people service on one day would be in there own box, and do this all in a way that a non-tech-savvy person could do each month. I thought pivot tables would be easy enough.

On Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 3:10:02 PM UTC-5, Eric wrote:
Thanks very much Jim for your explanation. It's not what I wanted to hear,
but it's what I needed to know.
Eric

"Jim Thomlinson" wrote:

Your only choice is row and column headers. Pivot tables aggregate data in a
cube. The data secton shows the aggregation of those fields. It can not show
text associated with those aggregations. The reason being is that the
aggregation may contain values with more than one descriptor at which point
what should it show.

A simple example...
Region / Location / Sales

If I place the region in the left column and sales in the data section then
the aggregation of the region will have multiple locations assocatied each
data value. Now if I add location to the data section what should it show???
--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson


"Eric" wrote:

Thanks for your response Jim.
I don't want the text codes to do anything. They are just descriptors of
some of the numbers in the same column, row, when those numbers have met
various external criteria. It is important information that I need to be
able to see as is with no conversion. They would not function properly as
column or row labels, they are data that need to appear next to the
particular numbers they qualify. I have the sinking feeling that for some
reason pivot tables can only deal with Values numerically. Even though it
would be straightforward to just place them where they belong unmolested.
Eric

"Jim Thomlinson" wrote:

The text field only makes sense in either the row or column headers.. If you
place it in the data section then it will return the most logical aggregation
which is a count as sum does not make sense with text.

In the data section of the pivot table what exactly were you wanting it to do?
--
HTH...

Jim Thomlinson


"Eric" wrote:

I am creating a simple pivot table with one field of values, numbers to be
summed, and a second field, occasional two letter alpha codes which are purely
descriptive and refer to the number in the same column, "row".
In the source spreadsheet, I have formatted the column which contains these
codes as "Text". Text is supposed to remain unchanged; however when that
column of data is entered into the pivot table as a value, it is handled as
though it were numeric data, and these two letter codes do not appear.
Because the software apparently recognizes the values as non-numeric it
assigns a "Count" descriptor by default, but this only converts each instance
of a the text values to "1", thus losing their original identity.
All the possible definers of the field are numeric operators like "Count" and
"Sum", which do not apply to an alpha code, which is just supposed to be
represented literally. Further I see no way to manipulate this data field to
be recognized as text in the pivot table itself.
How do I get the pivot table to just take this alpha data as is?
Thanks,
Eric