Excel Pivot Tables Recipe Book: A Problem-Solution Approach

CHAPTER 9Pivot Table Limits andPerformance

Excel PivotTable reports can summarize large amounts of data, but there are limits to what can go into different areas of the pivot table layout. When you're working with very large databases, performance can suffer, and creating or refreshing a pivot table can be extremely slow. This chapter outlines some of the limits and discusses ways to optimize the PivotTable performance.

9.1. Understanding Limits: 32,500 Unique Items with External Data Source

Problem

Your pivot table is based on a large external database that contains hundreds of thousands of records. You tried to add an OrderID field to the row area of your pivot table, and got the error message "A field in your source data has more unique items ...