Visio® 2007 Bible

Chapter 19. Analyzing Results with PivotDiagrams

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding Visio pivot diagrams

• Creating pivot diagrams

• Copying pivot diagrams

• Categorizing data

• Totaling values

• Showing combined categories

• Formatting pivot diagrams

Visio 2007 Professional includes a new PivotDiagram template. If you've never used pivot tables in Excel, you might wonder what the big deal is. And, people who can't live without Excel pivot tables wonder why they would need pivot diagrams in Visio, too.

When you have oodles of data to analyze, the sheer magnitude of information can make it almost impossible to make sense of the numbers or spot trends. In many situations, you want to look at the information from different perspectives, similar to rotating a painting to determine whether it's an impressionist landscape or just blotches of paint. For example, depending on what your management team is asking about, you might want to see sales totals by region, by product line, or by type of customer. Serious sessions in Excel with the SUMIF and COUNTIF functions can give you this kind of information, but pivot tables in Excel, and now pivot diagrams in Visio, provide tools to do just that with fewer headaches. With pivot features, you choose the category to use to slice and dice your data, specify the subtotals you're interested in, and the programs shuffle the data around to show totals by category.

Pivot diagrams in Visio perform the same kinds of transformations as pivot tables in Excel. In fact, an Excel workbook ...