Grouping

[amitshah]

I want to group similar items in a column together and need a quick way to do this.

What I have is a list of items (about 2000 items) and there are about 10 different columns for the items respective values ie. item number, item description, supplier, supplier partno ....... .etc. I want to group the items by suppliers. The problem is that cause I have sorted the list by item number the suppliers are not grouped and therefore are not one after the other, what I mean is that row 1 might have supplier1, row 50 might have supplier1 and the ones in between will have other suppliers. What is the quickest way to group by suppliers esp cause its such a big list?

Also if I want the groupings to have a heading on the side where the + and - buttons are, how can I do that? I want the heading to be the supplier's name (which I am grouping by).

Thanks.

[brettvba]

goto data
sort
sort by the column with the data you want grouped and accending or decending

[amitshah]

Thanks for that. I have already done that but then how do I group the items and have heading for the groupings?

what would be the easiest way to do this as fast as possible cause I would have about 30 odd suppliers and to pick out each of them is alot of manual work can this be automated?

Thanks.

[brettvba]

what are you actually wanting to do?

Have a total at the bottom?
?

[brettvba]

if thats what you want to do is a subtotal at each change in the column that the suppliers are in then add totals for the columns that you want.

[amitshah]

as an example:
item no| itemdesc | supplier | supp part no
item1 | xyz abc | supp1 | 1234
item2 | ghijklm | supp1 | 87823
item3 | abcdefgh | supp3 | 89732
item4 | pqrstuv | supp2 | 2347

etc etc

now what i want to do is group supp1 so it has a - and + button to minise the group or maximise it. same for supp2 and supp3. In this example there are only 3 suppliers but in my case there are about 30 different suppliers. So I need to find a way to group them automatically, if there is a way to do so. Otherwise do I need to select the suppliers manually to group them? Also once grouped next to the groups I need to put a heading to say what the groups are.

Hope you can understand what I am trying to ask.

Thanks.

[Yogi Anand]

Hi AmitShah:
I think you ought to try Pivot Table -- your original data can stay the way it is ... the Pivot Table will let you pivot the data any way you like -- this will facilitate things that you won't be able to do otherwise.

HTH.

Please post back if it works for you .. otherwise explain a little furthe and let us take it from there!

[amitshah]

yeah I think using pivot table would be the solution but havent used one before that is why was wondering if I could do it without using but will try it out.

Any hints on hwo to best use it?

Thanks.

[brettvba]

sorry I know what your trying to do can;t think of anything at the mo but in the mean time just autofilter the supplier you want to look at

[brettvba]

piviot tables I hate them too slow but is probably what you will need to use unless you went and manually grouped each supplier.