Grouping Customer names in Pivot table

[ajc623]

I am trying to look at several years of sales data by customer in order to compare year to year sales and possibly monthly or quarterly as well. I have no problem getting it into a pivot table and shown exactly like i want, but the problem is trying to consolidate various customers from the same company. For instance in my pivot table i may have

Acme Steve Jones
Acme Sara Miller
Acme Frank Martin
Acme Joe Smith

My goal would be to put all those together as Acme but when i group those together it also creates a "group" for every other item in the pivot table and makes it twice as many rows long. Since this is already 5,000 lines I trying to see how I can just group a few items and then go down my list to the next grouping and group those. Any help would be great.

Andrew

 

[mrmmickle1]

The easiest way I can think to approach this situation is to create a logical helper column that categorizes the data. You could do this using a Vlookup or a possibly an nested IF statement depending on how complex your data set is...

 

[RoryA]

When you group the names you basically get a copy of the original field with that grouping added so you can just remove the original field.