More bricks

There have been some changes in the appearance of the Microsoft Office products recently, possibly geared to the release of Windows 11 which I have not yet taken - and which my reasonably elderly computers may not be able to take.

And today, while peering at my brick carrying record over the past couple of years, I stumbled across three features of pivot tables in Excel. Which may actually be new or which may just be new-to-me.

The data in question is stored one row per shift, where each shift carries, inter alia, a date, a time of day and a distance.

First and most important, I can select the whole of the pivot table, date by distance, from the top left of the header row to the bottom right of the grand total row, ask for a line graph and get something sensible. No need to weed out all the subtotals from the data. Furthermore, on the graphic, I can toggle both months and quarters on and off. As shown, they are both toggled on.

Second, I can format the chart area in much the same way as any other graphic, choosing whether or not I want a border and if so what sort of border.

Third, I can store the chart as a graphic, choosing the format to be used. As shown, jpg.

All of which is a big improvement over what I was doing at reference 1.

It doesn't allow week, which I can see would be a bit tricky, with months not being a whole number of weeks.

It does allow time, but does not seem to do anything so simple as morning, afternoon and night - and I can't yet see how to get that from what it does do. Maybe that will come.

So pivot tables continue to improve - while continuing to strike a reasonable balance between you having to learn new features and it working out what you want without you having to do very much.

And brick walking continues to drift slowly down, now running at an average of around half a kilometre a day. Usually supplemented, I might add, by other forms of exercise.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/more-than-year-in-bricks.html.