Forum Discussion
Analyze Data - Help with Structuring Data to Improve Analysis
MicrosoftThanks for sending a question about the Analyze Data feature. Analyze Data can’t currently create suggestions based on PivotTables, so you’ll want to make sure you are running it on your original data.
If you have a column for each of the years, you’ll want to mention each one specifically, for example: 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 by item class as column chart (or a different chart type). Note that it's easier to ask questions over time when you have a single column with multiple date values.
If this doesn't work, you might want to make sure your data is formatted as a table. Please select all of it and click on Format as Table in the Home tab and then try Analyze Data again.
Let us know if this doesn’t solve your issue.
Thanks for your feedback,
Mar
Thanks for your answer, MarGines. I also have the data formatted as a table, but still couldn't get the answers I wanted out of the analyze data tool. This table has something like 15,000 lines of data, so I'm not exactly sure how I'd combine each year into one column. How does that work?
- MarGines
Sorry that didn't work. I wasn't suggesting you changed the structure of your data, just that the scenarios for which we have optimized the feature so far typically have dates grouped in columns. We continue to iterate and improve the quality of the feature and we'll incorporate your feedback as we do so.
Thanks again for reaching out, skeskali
Mar
MarGines My data is structured in a regular table in another worksheet (see screenshot). This is not a pivot table. I guess what I was looking for was suggestions or specific syntax that would help me get the answers I needed from such a large data set. My brain thinks in natural language, not Excel, so I think that asking a table like this one "Show me the top istat for each location for each year" should work, but it doesn't. Is there somewhere I might learn more about the proper syntax structure and how I might get more out of this tool?
