I am new to Numbers and am having problems sorting my pivot table on the desired column.
My first worksheet has a table of raw numbers for a sports league.
One column features a competitor's name.
The second contains a score for a game.
My pivot table takes these and sums the score for each competitor.
However I cannot sort the table by descending order of accumulated score, so we can see who is top of the table.
All help gratefully received.
You can sort Pivot Tables the way you sort other tables. Go to the column letter and choose from the dropdown:
If your Pivot Table has multiple "levels" and the sort functionality does not appear, then keep that Pivot Table and just create a new one based on the same data table. That way you can keep the original presentation the way you like but add a sortable "leaderboard" table.
SG
Thank you both for your prompt replies. However they don't solve my immediate issue. What if I wish to sort by the aggregated column? To use SGill's example, it's only offering to sort by "Competitor Ascending" or "Competitor Descending". I wish to sort by the Score (Sum) column, as you would in a leader board. You want the most successful team at the top. I don't mind having to hit the refresh button after a new set of scores are entered. But I can't get the thing to sort on the points tally.
Thanks again for any help offered.
simonfromportland wrote:
it's only offering to sort by "Competitor Ascending" or "Competitor Descending". I wish to sort by the Score (Sum) column, as you would in a leader board. You want the most successful team at the top.
I suggest trying the example.
The result after choosing "Competitor" Descending is this:
(I clicked the circled three dots by Rows and selected Hide Grand Total Row.)
With Pivot Tables there is no substitute for trying different things to get the output you want.
SG
So just to finish this off in case any other newbies are running into the same issue . . . to get the pivot table to sort on a column you have to click in the column in question before ctrl-clicking to get the Sort option which will search on that particular column. No idea how you sort on 2 columns. My problem was the cursor tended to be sitting in the wrong column whenever I tried to establish a sort. However, this probably very basic functionality isn't obvious at the outset.
It's like quick sorting any other Numbers table. Click the desired column letter at the top and choose Sort Ascending or Sort Descending from the dropdown that appears.
Unlike in other tables there isn't a sorting tab in the inspector pane on the right, so I don't think sorting on multiple columns is possible (and can't think of a use case for that).
SG
Numbers pivot table sorting on aggregated values
