updating other spreadsheets from a Mac pivot table

I am on the counting committee of my church. For the past few months I have been creating a Numbers spreadsheet to semi-automate the counting function. What we do is take the weekly collection, total checks, currency, and coin and create a deposit for the bank. Additionally, we must credit the members with their donations, and categories the special donations received. Eg. Special donations might include money for Altar flowers, outreach, food pantry etc. In order to automate some of the processes, I have created in Numbers the following: Member Acct number Pop-up list, Special Donation Pop-up list. The challenge: On any given Sunday I could have as many as three categories of Special Donations. The spreadsheet allows us to capture member name and account number, type of donation, amount, whether cash or check. By using a pivot table I have been able to capture the total amount of donations for each category we may encounter on given Sunday. The critical part of the process is to create a summary sheet that captures all of the income and identify by various categories. I know how to refresh the pivot table every week, but I don't know how to automatically update the summary sheet from the refreshed pivot table. Originally set it up using a lookup function. Works only until the pivot table is refreshed, then new categories aren't being picked up. Any Suggestions?

iMac 24″, macOS 15.5

Posted on Jun 30, 2025 6:47 PM

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Jun 30, 2025 7:59 PM in response to Charles Niemi

Can you post screenshots of your tables, pivot table, and desired summary table? (shift-command-4, drag to select area, release, start new post here and use the mountain-and-moon 'Image insertion' icon beneath the compose window to insert the screenshot from the Desktop.


SG

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Jul 1, 2025 11:06 AM in response to Charles Niemi

In addition to not being able to visualize the tables, I'm curious as to why you're building a summary table from the pivot table. Generally pivot tables are used to summarize data, so it sounds like you're trying to summarize a summary...?


It might be easier to just build a second pivot table from the source data, with different categorization/breakdowns.


Seeing the workflow would go a long way towards helping.

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updating other spreadsheets from a Mac pivot table

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